Manufacturing Productivity Growth in American Economic History

This chapter provides an overview of labor and total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector in the United States from colonial times to the present. An introductory section defines concept and terms. This is followed by an historical survey of improvement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sections on the manufacturing revolution of the 1920s and the sector’s contribution during the Great Depression. The remainder of the chapter provides a quantitative perspective on manufacturing productivity growth and its contribution to the overall economy from the end of World War I through the first decade of the twenty-first century.