Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- List of Appendices
- Preface and acknowledgements
- List of Weights, measures and money
- Prologue: Historical national income accounting
- Part I Measuring economic growth
- Part II Analysing economic growth
- 6 Real wage rates and GDP per head
- 7 Consumption
- 8 The social distribution of income
- 9 Labour productivity
- 10 Britain in an international context
- 11 Epilogue: British economic growth, 1270–1870
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Real wage rates and GDP per head
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- List of Appendices
- Preface and acknowledgements
- List of Weights, measures and money
- Prologue: Historical national income accounting
- Part I Measuring economic growth
- Part II Analysing economic growth
- 6 Real wage rates and GDP per head
- 7 Consumption
- 8 The social distribution of income
- 9 Labour productivity
- 10 Britain in an international context
- 11 Epilogue: British economic growth, 1270–1870
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Part I of this book has presented a predominantly positive picture of long-run economic growth and development in Britain from the Black Death of 1348–9 until 1870. Between the early fourteenth century and 1700 GDP per head approximately doubled and it doubled again between 1700 and 1870. Before 1780 progress was fitful, with the greatest gains concentrated into the twin periods of demographic decline in the second halves of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, but, crucially, there was little erosion of these gains during the sequel episodes of population growth in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, well before the industrial revolution got under way population and GDP per head were rising together. Malthus [1798], however, in his Essay on the principle of population, was convinced that the relationship between population growth and output per head was otherwise, since, sooner or later, diminishing returns to labour were bound to accrue. This is possibly exemplified by the inverse correlation between population and GDP per head that appears to have prevailed during the second half of the thirteenth century. It is without parallel over the next five centuries: later phases of population growth certainly brought their quota of socio-economic difficulties but, for the most part, declining GDP per head was not one of them.
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- British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 , pp. 247 - 278Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015