Sixty Eears after Fogel’s Social Savings: Measuring the Growth Impact of Railways in the Periphery

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• Alfonso Herranz Loncan (University of Barcelona)
• Thursday 14 November 2024, 17:15-18:45
• Room 6, Faculty of History.

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Some 60 years ago Fogel (1964) started a long-lasting debate on the role of railways in US economic growth in the late 19th century, which was also a debate on the possibility of using the concept of “social saving” as a measure of the growth impact of railways in an economy. His research was followed by a large number of works that applied the same methodology to other economies, both in the industrialised core and in the periphery, while Metzer (1977) and Crafts (2004) established a clearer link between the social saving concept and an economy’s productivity growth. Based on this literature, I have used the social saving methodology to measure the contribution of railways to economic growth before 1914 in six peripheral economies, namely Argentina, Brazil, the Cape Colony, Chile, India, Mexico and Uruguay. My estimates allow identifying some of the main determinants of the differences in the economic role of railways across the periphery. More importantly, they also show the limitations of the social savings approach and the difficulties of obtaining a single meaningful measurement of the growth impact of railways for very different economies and, more generally, of providing synthetic quantitative answers to complex historical problems.

This talk is part of the Core Seminar in Economic and Social History series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Core Seminar in Economic and Social History
• Department of Geography
• Economic and Social History Seminars
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Room 6, Faculty of History
• history

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