A Vision of the Growth Process in a Technologically progressive Economy: the United States, 1899-1941

Nicholas Craft will present new estimates of TFP growth at the sectoral level and an account of sectoral contributions to overall productivity growth, from his paper co-authored by Gerben Bakker (London School of Economics) and Pieter Woltjer (Wageningen University).  They improve on Kendrick (1961) in several ways including expanding the coverage of sectors, extending estimates to 1941, and better accounting for labor quality.  The results have important implications including that the pattern of productivity growth was generally ‘yeasty’ rather than ‘mushroomy’, that the 1930s did not experience the fastest TFP growth of the 20th century, and that the role of electricity as a general purpose technology does not explain the ‘yeastiness’ of manufacturing in the 1920s.

The link for a PDF copy of the paper may be found below.

Part of the Economic History Seminar Series, co-sponsored by The Europe Center.