مجموع رشد بهره وری عامل در راه آهن بریتانیا، 1852-1912: A ارزیابی شواهد

This paper revisits the issue of the productivity performance of Britain’s railways with an improved dataset and modern cliometrics. We find a slowdown in TFP growth between 1850 and 1870, after which it stabilized at about 1.1%. An analysis of company-level productivity performance reveals large discrepancies in TFP growth and substantial cost inefficiency. The evidence suggests that there was managerial failure in companies with agency problems in a context of collusion and high entry barriers. A wider implication is that the neoclassical exoneration of late-Victorian British management may be less convincing for the services sector than for manufacturing.

Before the new economic history came along, it was commonplace to allege that late nineteenth century Britain experienced ‘entrepreneurial failure’ and a climacteric in productivity growth (Landes, 1969 and Saul, 1968). Now these claims are much more muted or nuanced as it has been recognised that the quantitative evidence offers relatively little support for them (Crafts, 2004a). Indeed, as the excellent summary in Nicholas (2004) makes clear, the neoclassical view, backed up by substantial cliometric research, is that the economy was growing as fast as exogenous constraints allowed with no serious evidence of failure to maximize profits and competition eliminating entrepreneurial failures. Moreover, the suggestion originally made by Phelps-Brown and Handfield-Jones (1952) that there was a climacteric in industrial productivity growth resulting from the exhaustion of steam as a General Purpose Technology has been rejected (Crafts and Mills, 2004).

We posed four explicit questions at the outset. Our answers are as follows. First, on the basis of our new TFP index for British railways and a time-series analysis of its properties, we conclude that labor productivity was stationary over the long run while trend TFP growth fell steadily from a little under 2.5% per year in the 1850s to about 1.1% per year in the early 1880s, at which rate it continued without any further decline till World War I.