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American colonial incomes, 1650–1774
Author(s) -
Lindert Peter H.,
Williamson Jeffrey G.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the economic history review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.014
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1468-0289
pISSN - 0013-0117
DOI - 10.1111/ehr.12106
Subject(s) - economics , purchasing power , per capita income , per capita , colonialism , population , subsistence agriculture , agricultural economics , boom , population growth , investment (military) , geography , demography , macroeconomics , agriculture , political science , politics , sociology , archaeology , law , environmental engineering , engineering
New data now allow conjectures on the levels of real and nominal incomes in the 13 A merican colonies. N ew E ngland was the poorest region, and the S outh was the richest. Colonial per capita incomes rose only very slowly if at all, for five reasons: productivity growth was slow; population in the low‐income (but subsistence‐plus) frontier grew much faster than that in the high‐income coastal settlements; child dependency rates were high and probably even rising; the terms of trade were extremely volatile, presumably suppressing investment in export sectors; and the terms of trade rose very slowly, if at all, in the N orth, although faster in the S outh. All of this checked the growth of colony‐wide per capita income after a seventeenth‐century boom. The A merican colonies led G reat B ritain in purchasing power per capita from 1700, and possibly from 1650, until 1774, even counting slaves in the population. That is, average purchasing power in A merica led B ritain early, when A mericans were B ritish. The common view that A merican per capita income did not overtake that of B ritain until the start of the twentieth century appears to be off the mark by two centuries or more.

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