Agricultural productivity and european industrialization, 1890-1980.

Abstract

This exercise in comparative measurement and analysis surveys indicators for labour and land productivities in European agricultures between 1890 and 1980. It exposes the empirical flaws and above all the range of conceptual difficulties involved in defining agricultural outputs and inputs for purposes of international comparison. Yet the numbers do reveal how the industrialization of continental economies was constrained (and severely constrained in Mediterranean Europe) compared with that of the UK by malign historical legacies of high ratios of labour to land and an unfavourable ecological environment for the diffusion of the animal intensive technology of the first agrarian revolution.