UK GDP per Capita 1700-2016

I just remembered: FRED has UK population and RGDP numbers all the way back to 1700, a hundred years further back than we were looking at for the US. You should see, my eyes are lighting up.

FRED has two measures of Real GDP for the UK going back to 1700: "at factor cost" and "at market prices". I don't know how you have "Real GDP at market prices". Market prices are nominal, no? GKToday explains that "factor cost" is what the factors cost, while "market prices" subtract indirect taxes and add subsidies (to the factor cost number, apparently). I suppose you could do all that figuring in nominals, and then take inflation out of the numbers to get reals. But it still seems like ill-considered terminology. Real GDP is never "at market prices" (except in the base year).

Anyway, I don't know which measure of Real GDP is the common one. No matter: I'll show both. Data copyright © Bank of England:

Graph #1: Real GDP per Capita, UK, 1700-2016  (Two Measures of Real GDP Shown)

Following the same method I've been using, I brought the data into Excel, added Hodrick-Prescott trend lines (again with 10,000 smoothing), and switched the vertical axis to log scale. Here is the result:

Graph #2: UK RGDP per Capita (two measures) and Smoothed H-P Trends

Again, arches are visible in the smoothed data. At least two arches; I think, three. Notice the disturbance in the source data around year 1710.

Figuring growth rates of the smoothed data for 20-year periods, as before, produces this result:

Graph #3: 20-year Growth Rates, showing 3 Arches & a 1790-1820 Stillborn Arch

This gets more interesting the more I look at it.

Suppose we take the arches from the US RGDPpC data and add them to the graph:

Graph #4: UK (red & blue) and US (green) 20-year HP(RGDPpC,10000) Growth

I'm gonna let you ponder this for a while.

Part 4 of 4