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Resolving the Anglo-German Industrial Productivity Puzzle, 1895–1935: A Response to Professor Ritschl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

STEPHEN BROADBERRY  and
CARSTEN BURHOP
STEPHEN BROADBERRY
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom, and Coordinator of the Economic History Initiative at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London. Email: [email protected].
CARSTEN BURHOP
Affiliation:
Heisenberg-Fellow, Max-Planck-Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse 10, 53113 Bonn, Germany. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

This response offers a critical appraisal of the claim of Albrecht Ritschl to have found a possible resolution to what he calls the Anglo-German industrial productivity puzzle, which arose as the result of a new industrial production index produced in an earlier paper by the same author. Projection back from a widely accepted 1935/36 benchmark using the Ritschl index showed German industrial labor productivity in 1907 substantially higher than in Britain. This presented a puzzle for at least two reasons. First, other comparative information from the pre—World War I period, such as wages, seems difficult to square with much higher German labor productivity at this time. Second, a direct benchmark estimate produced by Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop, using production census information for Britain and industrial survey material of similar quality for Germany, suggested broadly equal labor productivity in 1907. Broadberry and Burhop also showed that if Walther Hoffmann's industrial output index was used instead of the Ritschl index for Germany, the puzzle largely disappeared.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 930 - 934
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2008

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References

REFERENCES

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