The climacteric in late victorian Britain and France: a reappraisal of the evidence

The paper investigates the question of whether the trend rate of growth of GDP slowed down in Britain or France in the nineteenth century. We establish that real GDP belongs to the trend-stationary process class of time-series in each case rather than the difference-stationary process and using Kalman filter techniques, analyse trends in a model incorporating time-varying parameters without specifying break-points in advance. We find, contrary to the literature, that neither country experienced a climacteric. Our results suggest that economic historians have been prone to exaggerated views of variations in trend economic growth.