Growth

Abstract

It is only very recently that, even within states, governments have been expected to take a responsibility for stimulating economic growth. During the nineteenth century neither statesmen, industrialists nor economists thought much in terms of ‘growth’ at all. They were concerned with ‘flourishing markets’, ‘plentiful money’, ‘prosperity’ — sometimes with ‘rising prosperity’. But they did not have the statistical basis needed for measuring precisely the increase in production from year to year; still less for making comparisons between the rates of growth achieved in different states. There was far greater concern about the immediate factors influencing prosperity in each country — harvest failures, banking collapses, new discoveries of gold or other minerals, the development of new technology, above all the vagaries of the trade cycle — than with exact comparisons between the fortunes of different economies or the policies that produced them.