Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Catch-up, convergence and the sources of post-war European growth: introduction and overview
- 2 Macroeconomic accounts for European countries
- 3 Sectoral growth accounting and structural change in post-war Europe
- 4 Measures of fixed capital stocks in the post-war period: a five-country study
- 5 Technology indicators and economic growth in the European area: some empirical evidence
- 6 Human capital and productivity in manufacturing during the twentieth century: Britain, Germany and the United States
- 7 Convergence and divergence in the European periphery: productivity in Eastern and Southern Europe in retrospect
- 8 Convergence: what the historical record shows
- 9 Growth and convergence in OECD countries: a closer look
- 10 On the historical continuity of the process of economic growth
- 11 Europe's Golden Age: an econometric investigation of changing trend rates of growth
- Index
11 - Europe's Golden Age: an econometric investigation of changing trend rates of growth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Catch-up, convergence and the sources of post-war European growth: introduction and overview
- 2 Macroeconomic accounts for European countries
- 3 Sectoral growth accounting and structural change in post-war Europe
- 4 Measures of fixed capital stocks in the post-war period: a five-country study
- 5 Technology indicators and economic growth in the European area: some empirical evidence
- 6 Human capital and productivity in manufacturing during the twentieth century: Britain, Germany and the United States
- 7 Convergence and divergence in the European periphery: productivity in Eastern and Southern Europe in retrospect
- 8 Convergence: what the historical record shows
- 9 Growth and convergence in OECD countries: a closer look
- 10 On the historical continuity of the process of economic growth
- 11 Europe's Golden Age: an econometric investigation of changing trend rates of growth
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The main aim of this chapter is to provide estimates of trend rates of growth in output per person based on modern methods of time series analysis. This is of interest for several reasons:
(i) we can obtain more reliable estimates of changes in trend growth and their statistical significance than hitherto;
(ii) this will allow us to put both the Golden Age of European growth in the earlier post-war period and the more recent slowdown into a long-run context;
(iii) in investigating whether the hypothesis of a unit root in output per person can be rejected, the results obtained inform not only statistical debate but also throw light on controversies in growth theory.
Our analysis is based almost entirely on the standard set of long-run data provided by Maddison (1991). To this we add only the recent estimates for Spain constructed by Prados (1993). The Maddison data have been used by a number of econometricians interested in unit root and segmented trend models and keen to avail themselves of long runs of data: see, for example, Ben-David and Papell (1993), Duck (1992) and Raj (1992).
These authors engage the data from the standpoint of the econometrics literature and, in particular, the debate triggered off by Perron (1989), who argued that the failure to allow for adverse exogenous shocks, such as the Great Crash of 1929 and the 1973 oil crisis, had led researchers erroneously to fail to reject the unit root hypothesis for USA GDP.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Quantitative Aspects of Post-War European Economic Growth , pp. 415 - 431Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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