Seven Centuries of European Economic Growth and Decline
利用六个欧洲国家七百年的人均GDP新数据，发现前工业时代存在多次经济增长期，但也伴随显著衰退，驳斥了工业革命前无增长的旧观点。
This paper investigates very long-run preindustrial economic development. New annual GDP per capita data for six European countries over the last seven hundred years paint a clearer picture of the history of European economic development. We confirm that sustained growth has been a recent phenomenon, but reject the argument that there was no long-run growth in living standards before the Industrial Revolution. Instead, the evidence demonstrates the existence of numerous periods of economic growth before the nineteenth century—periods of unsustained, but raising GDP per capita. We also show that many of the economies experienced substantial economic decline. Thus, rather than being stagnant, pre-nineteenth century European economies experienced a great deal of change. Finally, we offer some evidence that, from the nineteenth century, these economies increased the likelihood of being in a phase of economic growth and reduced the risk of being in a phase of economic decline.