Smithian growth in the little divergence: a general equilibrium analysis

To address growing concerns on the representativeness of real wages, we generate new estimates of GDP pc in pre-industrial England and Italy, as well as new exploratory estimates for Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Spain and Sweden, with Groth and Persson's (2016) general equilibrium model. Our results question the robustness of the current theoretical consensus on the “little divergence” and suggest an alternative hypothesis: north-western Europe saw faster Smithian growth than the rest of Europe after 1500.