The stationarity of British economic and productivity growth 1856-1913

Characterization of late nineteenth-century British economic performance rests heavily on identifying trends and turning points in GDP and productivity growth. Crafts, Leybourne and Mills (1989) provide the most sophisticated study in this genre, deploying a time-varying parameter model, to severely dent the notion of a climacteric. This paper argues the linear trend approach to assessing the climacteric may be otiose. Investigating the order of integration of the GDP series, and the cointengration of GDP and factor input growth, suggests both GDP and productivity growth tended to revert to a constant mean rate within the period 1856-1913, and undermines the notion of a climacteric.