Demographic, Economic, and Institutional Factors in the Transition to Modern Growth in England: 1530-1860

摘要

Economic growth, understood as an increase in the gross domestic product over a long period of time, is a contemporaneous phenomenon. As clearly explained in Maddison (2001), humanity was caught in a long-lasting trap of economic stagnation until thenineteenth century. This premodern period was accompanied by even more dire demographic conditions: according to Maddison's estimates, the size of the world population remained almost constant in the first millennium CE, and life expectancy at birth wasbelow 50 years until the beginning of the twentieth century.