Capital and Productivity

Gross and Net Capital Stocks from 1760

Capital stocks by asset and industry from 1855-1965 were constructed by Charles Feinstein as part of his work on National Accounts and can be found in

• Feinstein (1972) National Income Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom 1855-1965 (xls)

These are reproduced with the kind permission of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge and Professor Feinstein's family.

The estimates for capital formation, gross and net capital stocks and net trade were subsequently revised by Charles Feinstein in a joint study edited with Sidney Pollard. These data supersede those in the 1972 volume and decennial estimates were made back to 1760 for Great Britain. These are available in the spreadsheet

• Studies in Capital Formation in the United Kingdom 1750-1920 (xls).

These have been made available with the kind permission of Professor Feinstein's family and the literary estate of Professor Sidney Pollard.

Capital Stocks derived from the current ESA10 system of national accounts are available in current prices and chained volume measures from 1995 at the ONS website.

• ONS data on capital stocks and services from 1995

Data based on earlier systems of accounts can be found in the Blue Books which are available in the Relevant Periodicals Section below. But a useful snapshot of gross and net capital stock estimates by asset, industry and sector from 1948 to 2009 from the 2010 Blue Book on an ESA95 basis is linked below.

• Capital Stock from ESA95 based on SIC03 1948-2008

Capital Services from 1950

Experimental data on capital services is now produced by the ONS and annual data by industry for the market sector is available from 1950.

• ONS Experimental Data on Capital Services

UK labour and multi-factor productivity since 1760

Aggregate data back to 1760 on capital stocks and services, labour inputs and productivity measures, can be found in:

• The Labour, Capital and Productivity section of Millennium of Macroeconomic Data v3.1  (xls). Summary data are available to visualise via FRED

More detailed industry level data on productivity from 1950 can be found in the volume:

• Britain's Productivity Performance 1950-1996 (xls)

The data have been made available with the kind permission of the National Institute and Mary O'Mahony.

For modern UK productivity data comparable with estimates for other countries users should consult the Conference Board Total Economy Database and the EU KLEMS database.

Sources and methods

Capital Stocks and Services
For a discussion of the methodology behind the construction of consistent estimates of capital stocks and services in the UK, users should consult the article by Oulton and Wallis linked below:

• Capital stocks and capital services: integrated and consistent estimates for the United Kingdom, 1950–2013 by Nick Oulton and Gavin Wallis

This builds on earlier work on the UK by Dean, Redfern, Wallis and Oulton and Srinivasan:

• The Stock of Fixed Capital in the United Kingdom in 1961 by Geoffrey Dean
• Net Investment in Fixed Assets in the United Kingdom, 1938-1953 by Philip Redfern
• Capital Services Growth in the UK: 1950 to 2006 by Gavin Wallis
• Capital stocks, capital services, and depreciation: an integrated framework by Nick Oulton and Sally Srinivasn (BoE WP no. 192)

Since that work was completed, recent work by NIESR has reviewed the asset lives used in the computation of UK national capital stocks can be found here:

• Academic Review of Asset Lives in the UK

This fed into the changes made by ONS in the estimation of capital stock and services discussed at the links below:

• Changes to the capital stock estimation methods for Blue Book 2019

Total Factor or Multi-factor Productivity (TFP/MFP)
Charles Hulten's NBER chapter outlining the history of the Total Factor Productivity concept can be found at the NBER website below:

• Total Factor Productivity - A Short Biography

Uses of data

For a review of UK productivity growth since 1760 based on the most recent historical data sources see the paper by Professor Nick Crafts:

• The Sources of British Economic Growth since the Industrial Revolution: Not the Same Old Story

For an analysis of UK productivity in manufacturing and services from 1850 the two volumes by Professor Steve Broadberry are available in limited preview form on Google books below:

• The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850-1990
• Market Services and the Productivity Race 1850-2000

Mary O'Mahony's book on the UK's productivity performance in the postwar period is provided below:

• Britain's Productivity Performance 1950-1966 (65MB)

with the kind permission of Mary O'Mahony and NIESR.

Recent ESCoE research by Rebecca Riley, Ana Rincon Aznar and Lea Samek has provided a sectoral account of the UK productivity puzzle between 2011-2015:

• ESCoE DP 2018-06 - Below the Aggregate: A Sectoral Account of the UK Productivity Puzzle

The following titles are available to select in the dropdown menus of this section.

• UK National Accounts (Blue Books) since 1941

Please select a publication title and year from the boxes below to narrow down the list. Alternatively type in a general search term. The available excel and pdf files are shown in the table. If the publication you are looking for is not in this section please see the complete list of downloadable publications. 

Select Publication or Input Search Term