In the year 1--we guess--world population was about 170 million. In the year 1650--we guess--it was about 540 million. This tripling of world population over the course of one and two-thirds millennia was accompanied by very little improvement in the standard of living of the median peasant (though things may well have been very different for the upper-class elite). We can thus say that world real GDP--at least when measured in terms of necessities rather than luxuries--roughly tripled over this one and two-thirds millenium.
Between 1650 and 1800, we think that world population grew from about 540 million to about 800 million--a rate of 0.3% per year. We also think that by 1800 that perhaps a quarter of the world lived perhaps half again as well in a material sense as it had in 1650--giving a further 0.1% per year boost to world real GDP growth.
Between 1800 and 1900, world population grew from 800 million to 1.5 billion, and world average GDP per capita rose by perhaps 50%--for an average annual rate of GDP growth of 1.0% per year.
We can feed these numbers to a standard Solow growth model with natural resources, with a capital share between .2 and .3 and a resources share between .2 and .3 as well, as in:
J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Lecture Notes: Econ 101B: Explorations in the Theory of Economic Growth: Natural Resources and Malthusian Population Dynamics" http://delong.typepad.com/print/20060905_lecture_notes.pdf
We can then guess that the rate of real GDP and population growth over the period from 1 to 1650 was roughly 0.07% per year. Under the further assumption that natural resources had a parameter of roughly 0.3 in the world economy's production function back then, we can calculate that total factor productivity growth in the pre-1650 world averaged 0.03% per year; for the 1650-1800 period, 0.25% per year; and from 1800 to 1900, 0.5% per year.
Compare and contrast that to the 2% per year of total factor productivity growth in the world today.
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