This article presents new estimates for investment and new growth accounts for three socialist economies between 1950 and 1989. Government statistics reported distorted measures for both the rate and the trajectory of productivity growth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Researchers have benefited from revised output data, but have continued to use official statistics on capital input, or estimated capital stock from official investment data. Investment levels and rates of capital accumulation were much lower than officially claimed and over-reporting worsened over time. A setback in factor accumulation-both investment in equipment and labour inputcontributed very significantly to the socialist growth failure of the 1980s.

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This article reconsiders the relative growth performance of centrally planned economies in the broader context of postwar growth in Europe. It reports a new dataset of revised estimates for investment rates in eastern European countries between 1950 and 1989. Complemented with data on other growth determinants, this evidence is used to re-evaluate the socialist growth record in a conditional convergence framework with a panel of 24 European countries. After controlling for relative backwardness, investment rates, and improvements in human capital, the findings show that centrally planned economies underperformed due to their relative inefficiency only after the postwar golden age. In the 1950s and 1960s, eastern Europe was falling behind mainly due to relatively low levels of investment and weak reconstruction dynamics. Both are explained, in part, by the lack of labour-supply flexibility that, in turn, resulted from the comparatively much larger negative impact of the war on population growth in eastern Europe.

The contributions to this Special Issue present the state of the art of growth accounting in economic history, exhibiting its strengths and weaknesses. Three set of articles compose the issue: comparative papers that discuss the challenges ahead, long‐run perspectives on Britain since the Industrial Revolution, Japan, Italy and Spain from the late‐19th century, and Latin America during the 200 years since independence, and post‐World War II episodes under Soviet and Fabian socialism and the transition to market economies in Eastern Europe and India. The papers reveal how sensitive the interpretation of results is to the quality of output and inputs and the growth accounting procedure employed and the need to adopt the new developments in growth accounting to improve economic history narrative.