COMPARATIVE PRODUCTIVITY IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN MANUFACTURING DURING THE 19TH-CENTURY

Conventional accounts of comparative Anglo-American economic performance, based on national accounts data, see Britian as the labor productivity leader until the 1890s. However, figures for the manufacturing sector suggest that U.S. labor productivity was already substantially higher than that in Britian by the early nineteenth century. The U.S. rise to overall productivity leadership was thus due to a combination of trends in nonmanufacturing sectors and distributional shifts into the high-productivity manufacturing sector rather than due to trends within manufacturing. Although in agriculture Britain had higher labor productivity than that in America, Britain still had a comparative advantage in manufacturing on account of resource endowments. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.