Conceptualization and Measurement of Productivity Growth and Technical Change: A Nonparametric Approach

This chapter explores the links between profitability, investment, and structural change. This is examined for the case of India, using both a historical overview and regression analysis. In a Kaldorian dynamic economy, the reallocation of investment provides the driver for resource reallocation, allowing more productive and profitable activities to expand and less productive and less profitable activities to contract. Thus, investment choices drive structural change, productivity growth, technological advance, and ultimately profits. Investment in turn responds to expected profits, which are driven by technical change, related productivity gains, and shifts in demand. The relationships are thus circular and cumulative, with this chapter testing for the presence of such relationships.

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Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700–1800

The Journal of Economic History ◽

10.1017/s0022050700011943 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 52 (4) ◽

pp. 881-906 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

Trevor Griffiths ◽

Philip A. Hunt ◽

Patrick K. O'Brien

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Total Factor Productivity ◽

Productivity Growth ◽

Technical Change ◽

Consumer Goods ◽

Textile Industry ◽

Industrial Development ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

Factor Productivity ◽

Inventive Activity

An analysis of innovations in the eighteenth-century British textile industry is the basis for an evaluation of aggregate studies of invention during the Industrial Revolution, derived from patent evidence alone. Disaggregation of the data challenges recent generalizations concerning the pace and pattern of technical change over the period. Discontinuities in the nature of invention, promoting an acceleration in total factor productivity growth, are traced to the 1790s. Prior to that date, industrial development conformed to a pattern of Smithian growth, as manufacturers diversified their output in response to an expanding domestic market for consumer goods.

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Simulating the Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution

The Journal of Economic History ◽

10.1017/s0022050700025778 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 60 (3) ◽

pp. 819-841 ◽

Cited By ~ 41

Author(s):

C. Knick Harley ◽

N.F.R. Crafts

Keyword(s):

Productivity Growth ◽

Technical Change ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

Economic Structure ◽

Trade Data ◽

Trade Model ◽

Computational General Equilibrium ◽

Cge Modeling ◽

Food Imports ◽

New View

This study examines technical change, trade, economic structure, and growth during the British Industrial Revolution by means of computational general equilibrium (CGE) modeling. It rejects Peter Temin's contention that our “new view” of sectorally concentrated productivity growth is inconsistent with industrial export data. A CGE trade model with diminishing returns in agriculture and realistic assumptions about consumer demand shows that while technical change in cottons and iron were major spurs to exportation of those specific goods, the need for food imports also stimulated exports generally. Incorporating trade data thus enriches our “new view.”

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