Ronald Albers

The empirics of growth

SummaryThis study explores the long-run dynamics of economic growth, with particular reference to The Netherlands. The time span covered extends backwards to the mid-nineteenth century, using new time series on disaggregated physical and human capital stocks for the period 1850-1913. Economic growth in the nineteenth century is shown to have had a strong physical capital-using bias, initially concentrated in buildings and infrastructure. The close relationship between investment in machinery and economic growth did not begin to take shape until the end of the nineteenth century, to increase in strength in the course of the twentieth century.