When Did Growth Begin? New Estimates of Productivity Growth in England from 1250 to 1870
Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025 · Paul Bouscasse、Emi Nakamura、Jón Steinsson
中文摘要
我们估计了1250年至1870年间英格兰的生产率增长。这一时期的实际工资深受瘟疫引发的人口波动的强烈影响。我们的估计已将这些马尔萨斯动态纳入考量。我们发现，1600年之前生产率增长为零。生产率增长始于1600年——几乎比光荣革命早了一个世纪。因此，生产率增长的开端先于17世纪英格兰的资产阶级制度改革。我们估计，1600年至1800年间生产率每十年增长2%，1810年至1860年间加速至每十年增长5%。工业革命期间产出增长的大部分提高可由结构变迁——即土地在生产中重要性的下降——来解释，而非生产率增长加快所致。18世纪与19世纪早期实际工资的停滞——即“恩格斯停顿”——可由人口快速增长对实际工资造成的下行压力来解释。然而，人口增长向实际工资的反馈足够微弱，使得工业革命之前得以持续偏离“工资铁律”。
Abstract
Abstract We estimate productivity growth in England from 1250 to 1870. Real wages over this period were heavily influenced by plague-induced swings in the population. Our estimates account for these Malthusian dynamics. We find that productivity growth was zero before 1600. Productivity growth began in 1600—almost a century before the Glorious Revolution. Thus, the onset of productivity growth preceded the bourgeois institutional reforms of seventeenth-century England. We estimate productivity growth of 2% per decade between 1600 and 1800, increasing to 5% per decade between 1810 and 1860. Much of the increase in output growth during the Industrial Revolution is explained by structural change—the falling importance of land in production—rather than faster productivity growth. Stagnant real wages in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—Engels’ Pause—is explained by rapid population growth putting downward pressure on real wages. Yet feedback from population growth to real wages is sufficiently weak to permit sustained deviations from the “iron law of wages” prior to the Industrial Revolution.