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Variations in Economic Growth and Banking Developments in the United States From 1835 to 1885*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Clark Warburton
Clark Warburton
Affiliation:
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
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Extract

Taken as a whole the half century from 1835 to 1885 was a periodof substantial economic growth in the United States. The population increased nearly fourfold, or at an annual rate in the neighborhood of 2½ to 2½ per cent per year. Estimates of the national income show a figure at the end of the period six- or sevenfold as large as that at the beginning, the equivalent of an average growdi rate of about 3½ to 4 per cent per year. A crude available estimate of national wealth suggests about a tenfold change, or an annual growth averaging close to 5 per cent. These growth rates for income and wealth do not need to be adjusted downward for price changes, because the available wholesale price indexes suggest that in the middle of the 1880's the price level was a little lower than in the middle of the 1830's. The figures are not to be taken as first class statistical data. They merely indicate the apparent order of magnitude of the degree of growth.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 1958 , pp. 283 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1958

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References

1 All computations are from series published in Historical Statistics of the United States, (Washington: Bureau of the Census, 1949)Google Scholar.

2 It may be noted, as an illustration, that of the eight selected statistical indicators of business cycle turns classified as “roughly coincident” with the turns by Geoffrey H. Moore, four are value series and four physical quantity series. Moore, Geoffrey H., Statistical Indicators of Cyclical Revivals and Recessions (Occasional Paper 31, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1950)Google Scholar.

3 Walker, Amasa, The Science of Wealth: A Manual of Political Economy (1866), p. 148Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 152.

5 Ibid., p. 155.

6 Ibid., pp. 159-160.

7 In a few places, notably in the branch banks of the State Bank of Ohio, bank supervisory authorities did not permit the substitution of “greenbacks” for the specie required to be held in the banks' own vaults.