Standards, Learning and Growth in Britain 1901-2009

This paper considers the model of voluntary, consensus based standardization as developed through the British Standards Institution (BSI) and its contribution to learning and productivity growth. It discusses the contribution of professional engineers to the model's introduction, its extension at home and imitation overseas, arguing that by 1931 the BSI catalogue of standards represented a considerable stock of codified knowledge whose growth reflected underlying aggregate technological advance. To validate this claim we incorporate a measure of the BSI catalogue of standards into an econometric model of productivity growth in Britain. However, caution is required in the interpretation of this finding.