Market Services and the Productivity Race, 1850-2000

Stephen Broadberry is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. His recent books include The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective (1997) and, as editor with Mark Harrison, The Economics of World War I (2005).

• Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Introduction and overview; Part I. Measuring Comparative Productivity Performance: 2. The contribution of services to the productivity performance of the whole economy; 3. Comparative productivity performance in market services; 4. A sectoral data base: Britain, the United States and Germany, 1870–1990; Part II. Explaining Comparative Productivity Performance: 5. Technology, organisational change and the industrialisation of services; 6. Investment in physical and human capital; 7. Competition and the institutional framework; Part III. Reassessing the Performance of British Market Services: 8. The 'golden age' of British commerce, 1850–1914; 9. The collapse of the liberal world economic order, 1914–50; 10. Completing the industrialisation of services, 1950–90; 11. British services in the 1990s: a preliminary assessment; 12. Summary and conclusions; Bibliography.

'The book's great achievement is to force us to refocus our thinking.' Contemporary European History