TY  - JOUR
AU  - Long,J. Bradford De
TI  - Productivity and Machinery Investment: A Long Run Look 1870-1980
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3903
PY  - 1991
Y2  - November 1991
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3903
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3903.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
J. Bradford DeLong
Department of Economics
601 Evans Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/643-4027
Fax: 510/642-6615
E-Mail: delong@econ.berkeley.edu
AB  - Over the past century the long-run growth of six economies shows a strong association between investment in machinery and economic growth that holds both within and across nations and periods. A similar strong association holds for the post-world War II period for a broader cross section of nations. A number of considerations suggest that this association is causal, and that a high rate of machinery investment is a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run productivity growth - a hypothesis also supported by narratives from the history of technology.
ER  -