India and the great divergence: An Anglo-Indian comparison of GDP per capita, 1600–1871

Abstract

Estimates of Indian GDP are constructed from the output side for 1600-1871, and combined with population data. Indian per capita GDP declined steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before stabilising during the nineteenth century. As British growth increased from the mid-seventeenth century, India fell increasingly behind. Whereas in 1600, Indian per capita GDP was over 60 per cent of the British level, by 1871 it had fallen to less than 15 per cent. These estimates place the origins of the Great Divergence firmly in the early modern period, but also suggest a relatively prosperous India at the height of the Mughal Empire. They also suggest a period of "strong" deindustrialisation during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, with a small decline of industrial output rather than just a declining share of industry in economic activity.JEL classification: N10, N30, N35, O10, O57

Testing the demand approach to reconstruct pre-industrial agricultural output

“…Only if the own price elasticity of non-agricultural products is less than −1, is the cross price elasticity of agricultural products positive. Setting b equal to 0 is the most neutral assumption (such assumption is also made in Broadberry et al, 2015), and it simplifies the Equation (4) further:…”

“…The approach was originally developed by Crafts and Allen (Allen, 2000, p. 13;Crafts, 1976Crafts, , 1980Crafts, , 1985. It has been used to estimate the agricultural production in UK (Jackson, 1985), Italy (Malanima, 2011), Spain (Álvarez-Nogal & Prados de la Escosura, 2007Escosura, , 2013; Molinas & Prados de la Escosura, 1989), Germany (Pfister, 2011), Sweden (Schön & Krantz, 2012), Latin America (Arroyo Abad & van Zanden, 2014), India (Broadberry, Custodis, & Gupta, 2015) and Japan (Bassino, Broadberry, Fukao, Gupta, & Takashima, 2015).…”

Why Did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain?

“…From a pure macroeconomic point of view, the early modernists have detected a small but steady acceleration of growth in Northwest Europe, at least in two countries, namely England and the Netherlands, before the industrial revolution (see e.g. Wrigley, 1985;van Zanden, 2002;Broadberry and Bishnupriya, 2006;Allen, 2008a;de Vries, 2008;Maddison, 2008;Persson, 2008;van Leeuwen, 2011, 2012;Broadberry et al, 2011Nuvolari and Ricci, 2013;Broadberry, 2014;Broadberry, Guan and Li, 2014;Bolt and Van Zanden, 2014;Broadberry, Custodis and Gupta, 2015). Broadberry et al (2011's estimates, built on an output-based approach, thus show a persistent upward trend in GDP per capita which would have doubled between 1270 and 1700 5 .…”

Economic Development in Africa and Europe: Reciprocal Comparisons

“…For example, recent studies of per capita calorie consumption (an important indicator of living standards) in pre-industrial Europe have used evidence from modern developing countries to estimate the number of calories needed to survive (Livi-Bacci 1991;Allen 2009;Humphries 2012, pp. 6-11), while other studies have made use of estimates of income and price elasticities of demand from later developing countries to work out food consumption trends in pre-industrial Europe (Álvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura 2013; Broadberry et al 2015b;Kelly andÓ Gráda 2013, p. 1139).…”