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Manufacturing and the Convergence Hypothesis: What the Long-Run Data Show

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Stephen N. Broadberry
Stephen N. Broadberry
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7 AL, United Kingdom.
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Abstract

The commonly accepted chronology for comparative productivity levels, based on GDP data, does not apply to the manufacturing sector, which shows evidence of a much greater degree of stationarity of comparative labor productivity performance among the major industrialized countries of Britain, Germany, and the United States. These results for manufacturing suggest that convergence of GDP per worker must have occurred through trends in other sectors and through compositional effects of structural change. The persistent, large labor productivity gap between the United States and Europe cannot be explained simply by differences in capital per worker, but is related to technological choice.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 772 - 795
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1993

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