Labor Productivity in Britain and America During the Nineteenth Century

A number of writers have recently questioned whether labor productivity or per capita incomes were ever higher in the United Kingdom than in the United States. We show that although the United States already had a substantial labor productivity lead in industry as early as 1840, especially in manufacturing, labor productivity was broadly equal in the two countries in agriculture, while the United Kingdom was ahead in services. Hence aggregate labor productivity was higher in the United Kingdom, particularly since the United States had a larger share of the labor force in low value-added agriculture. U.S. overtaking occurred decisively only during the 1890s, as labor productivity pulled ahead in services and the share of agricultural employment declined substantially. Labor force participation was lower in the United States, so that the United Kingdom's labor productivity advantage in the mid-nineteenth century translated into a larger per capita income lead.

The British Army, information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs

Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies. KEY WORDS: British Army, Information Management, First World War, Revolution in Military Affairs, Adaptatio

Purchasing Power Parity and the Pound-Dollar Rate in the 1930s.

Opponents of flexible exchange rates have stressed their volati lity during the 1930s, while advocates of flexible exchange rates have stressed their relationship to fundamental economic variables. The author reconciles the two views, allowing that although exchange rates did move to preserve pruchasing power parity in the long run, there could be substantial deviations from purchasing power parity in the short run. For the pound-dollar rate, the source of the large fluctuations in the early 1930s lay in the asymmetric response of foreign-exchange markets to fluctuations in Britain and America while the latter adhered to the gold standard. Copyright 1987 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Manufacturing and the Convergence Hypothesis: What the Long Run Data Show

The commonly accepted chronology for comparative productivity levels based on GDP data does not apply to the manufacturing sector, where there is evidence of a much greater degree of stationarity of comparative labour productivity performance among the major industrialized countries of Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. These results for manufacturing suggest that convergence of GDP per worker must have occurred through trends in other sectors and through compositional effects of structural change. The persistent large labour productivity gap between the US and Europe cannot be explained simply by differences in capital per worker, but is related to technological choice.Convergence; Labour Productivity; Long-run; Manufacturing

Why was Unemployment in Postwar Britain So Low

This paper takes a fresh look at the low unemployment in postwar Britain, which is seen as exceptional rather than the norm. During the 1950s and 1960s low unemployment was reconciled with stable inflation through the exercise of wage restraint. Yet the postwar settlement which underpinned this wage restraint also allowed the entrenchment of restrictive practices, which inevitably slowed the growth of productivity and the feasible real wage, thus contributing to Britain's relative economic decline.Postwar Settlement; Real Wage; Unemployment