Introduction

So far, we have established levels and trends of comparative labour productivity in manufacturing for Britain, the United States and Germany. These three countries have accounted for between 40 and 65 per cent of world trade in manufactures over the last 150 years (Broadberry, 1994a). These data are supplemented in this chapter with new estimates for a number of other New World and European countries, thus building up a wider geographical coverage.

The results confirm the picture of a persistent labour productivity lead in the United States rather than convergence to the same labour productivity level by all countries in manufacturing. There is also evidence of convergence to a common level of labour productivity in European manufacturing, although along separate North European and South European paths, with southern countries lagging substantially behind in the first half of the twentieth century. These findings suggest that the extent of industrialisation, and particularly the lack of a large labour force in low productivity agriculture, was of crucial importance for the attainment of high living standards, as measured in national income statistics, a theme which we take up in more detail in chapter 5.

We briefly examine the trends in comparative productivity levels in manufacturing, and compare them with the trends in productivity at the whole economy level. Table 4.1 sets out the whole economy data, based on the latest figures of Maddison (1995), but with some minor adjustments to facilitate comparison with the manufacturing productivity figures.