Industrial Production

Abstract

NOW we come to the last and in many ways most important part of our discussion, our analysis of the declining rate of growth of industrial productions in Britain both in total and per head. There is some controversy over the timing of this decline; Phelps Brown dated it from the 1890s, but Coppock demonstrated that it began two decades before and indeed, but for the distortion introduced by the recovery of the cotton industry after the American Civil War, a retardation is apparent from the mid-1860s onwards (see 10 and 38). The statistics for these years are too rough for us to be very precise on that matter, and for the whole period must be treated with caution. They are given in Table IV.¹ Again there is the problem of cyclical distortion arising from the 1873 boom, but the trends, especially of output per head, are too marked to be explained by that factor alone.