We document comparative productivity performance since 1870, showing the importance of services for US overtaking of Britain. The transition in market services from customised, low-volume, high-margin business organised on a network basis to standardised, high-volume, low-margin business with...

Since the mid-1990s, an almost universal belief has developed amongst economic commentators that the United States has undergone a productivity miracle and that European economies are now suffering from chronic sclerosis. As a result, the ‘American model’ dominates the agenda of...

Estimates of Indian GDP are constructed from the output side for 1600–1871, and combined with population data. Indian per capita GDP declined steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before stabilising during the nineteenth century. As British growth increased from the...