Three Centuries of Macro-Economic Statistics

Seven Centuries of Economic Growth and Decline

This paper investigates very long run pre-industrial economic development. New annual GDP per capita data for six European countries over the last seven hundred years paints a clearer picture of the history of European economic development. First, it confirms that sustained growth has been a recent phenomenon, but rejects the argument that there was no permanent growth in living standards befor...

Assessment of macro economic transmission

Macro-Economic Forecasting and Modelling

Confidence in macro-economic forecasting has periodically been punctured by episodes of economic turbulence and concomitant predictive failure. The poor performance in predicting the consumer boom in the late 1980’s, and the depth and duration of the recession in the 1990’s, can be viewed as merely the latest examples in a catalogue of failures, with noteworthy antecedents including the under-p...

The state of macro-economic modelling

The first is based upon the seminal work of Nobel Prize winner Larry Klein in his 1947 paper. This has two basic components. First, an essentially Keynesian system of macro-theoretical relationships. Second, fitting curves (planes) through empirical macrodata using econometric (statistical) techniques to estimate parameters for these theoretical relationships. Over the past 60 years, the models...

Six Centuries of British Economic Growth: a Time-Series Perspective

This paper provides a time-series analysis of recent annual estimates of real GDP and industrial output covering 1270 to 1913. We show that growth can be regarded as a segmented trend stationary process. On this basis, we find that trend growth of real GDP per person was zero prior to the 1660s but then experienced two significant accelerations, preand post-industrial revolution. We also find t...