Chapter 6

Twentieth Century Growth

Nicholas Crafts* and Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke,    *Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom,    All Souls College, Oxford OX1 4AL, United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper surveys the experience of economic growth in the 20th century with a focus on technological change at the frontier together with issues related to success and failure in catch-up growth. A detailed account of growth performance based on historical national accounts data is given and is accompanied by a review of growth accounting evidence on the sources of economic growth. The key features of our analysis of divergence in growth outcomes are an emphasis on the importance of “directed” technical change, ...

Get Handbook of Economic Growth now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.