【正文】 “follower” countries have a lower level of labour productivity (or GDP per capita). Since 1500 there have been four lead countries, Northern Italy in the sixteenth century, the Netherlands from the sixteenth century until the Napoleonic wars, when the UK took over. The British lead lasted until around 1890, and the USA has been the lead country since then.(ii) Quantifying the Causes of GrowthAs quantitative evidence on parative GDP growth has a。 USSR –Africa Rest World Source : Maddison (2003), p. 263.The years 19501973 were a golden age of unparalleled prosperity. World GDP rose at an annual rate of 5 per cent, per capita GDP near 3 per cent and world trade almost 8 per cent a year. There was a significant degree of convergence in per capita ine, with most regions growing faster than the USA (the lead economy). After 1973, there was a marked slowdown in world growth, with substantial divergence between different regions, and performance in many of them below potential. Nevertheless, on a world basis this latest phase was the secondbest since 1820. It is clear that “modern economic growth”, in all its phases, has been much faster than in the preceding centuries. From the year 1500 to 1820, world per capita ine rose .05 per cent a year. From 1820 to 2001, it averaged per cent, nearly 25 times as fast。 Hodne and Grytten (1994) for Norway。 Hjerppe and Associates (1987) for Finland。 LevyLeboyer amp。s (197476) work on Denmark showed evidence of substantial advance in the early nineteenth century。 New Zealand.b) the evidence now available suggests that the transition to accelerated growth started around 1820, not 1760 as Kuznets thought. The work of Crafts and others on British performance in the eighteenth century helped demolish the old notion of a sudden takeoff in the second half of that century. The important point about Britain’s exceptionalism is not an industrial revolution, but a much longer process of ascension, with per capita growth faster from 1500 onwards than in the rest of Europe。 f. USSR 695 2,064 2,072Africa 203 550 1 222Rest 1 2 137 6 626 17 862World 1 2 5 330 16 024 37 194% West/World Source for tables 4 and 5: Maddison (2003), pp. 259 amp。 f. USSR 498 686 941 1 558 2 602 5 731 5 038Africa 414 420 500 637 894 1 410 1 489Rest 538 578 606 860 1 091 2 072 3 377World 566 667 875 1 525 2 111 4 091 6 049Interregional Spread :1 :1 :1 :1 :1 :1 :1West/Rest Spread :1 :1 :1 :1 :1 :1 :1Average per capita ine of the West rose 20fold between 1820 and 2001, and less than ninefold in the Rest. The spread between the two groups rose from 2:1 to nearly 7:1and the interregional gap increased much more from 3:1 to 18:1. Nevertheless, it is clear from Table 5 that the Western share of world GDP has peaked and will in all probability fall considerably more if the two Asian tigers, India and China maintain a high growth momentum。s ideas had been monly accepted in the West. So that there were not the people to meet as we do: now we have 7 or 8 or 9 people who are by and large the chief professional advisers of the main Western Governments all have more or less the same professional training in that they understand how to maintain the level of activity and what forces operate on it.” (Cairncross, 1991, ).IIQuantifying and Interpreting World Economic Growth in the Capitalist EpochSimon Kuznets (190185) did more than anyone else to push back the quantitative time horizon beyond 1950 by promoting the development of historical evidence on “modern” economic growth and interpreting its driving forces. He convinced many of his distinguished students, and an international network of scholars, that such an exercise was feasible, exciting and important. In 1940, Colin Clark had estimates of GDP growth for 16 countries. Most were rough proxies, and the average number of years covered was 19. By 1971, Kuznets had assembled estimates for 21 countries, for an average around 75 years. Maddison (2003) included 163 countries for 1950, 52 for 1913, and 25 for 1820. As a result of these efforts we now have quantitative evidence for 79% of world GDP for 1820, and 99% in 1950. This has revolutionised the analytical scope of economic history by giving it a quantitative underpinning.Table 3 Coverage of Maddison (2003) GDP Sample, percent of Regional and World GDP1500 1700 1820 1870 1913 1950W. Europe W. Offshoots 0 99 100 E. E. amp。s 10 Largest Countries: Comparative Ranking, 1950 amp。 iii) a Fisher geometric average of the two measures. Binary parisons, . Germany/USA and UK/USA, could then be linked with the USA as the star country. Such star parisons could provide a proxy Germany/UK parison, but it was not “transitive” (. the result would not be identical to that derived from a direct Germany/UK parison). This was not a great drawback for OEEC countries where the intercountry deviation in performance levels was not too wide. But Kravis, Heston and Summers were engaged in parisons over a much wider range of per capita ine. They therefore adopted the GearyKhamis method, invented by Roy Geary (18961983) and Salem Khamis, which multilateralised the results, provided transitivity and other desirable properties. They used it in conjunction with the modity product dummy method (CPD), invented by Robert Summers, for filling holes in the basic dataset. Their masterpiece was their third study, the 1982 volume World Product and Ine, which contained estimates for 34 countries (in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe) in 1975 prices and international GearyKhamis dollars. These countries accounted for 64 per cent of world GDP in 2001.Table 1 Nature of PPP Converters to Estimate GDP Levels in the Benchmark Year 1990(billion 1990 GearyKhamis dollars and number of countries)Europe amp。 iii) a promise geometric (Fisher) average of the first two measures. The corresponding measures of real expenditure were