Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Conjectural Estimates Of Economic Growth In The Lower South, 1720 To 1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

This paper describes the first step in a larger project to build up regional estimates of economic growth before 1800 in the parts of North America that became the United States. In it we employ the method of conjectural estimation to develop new estimates of the rate of economic growth in the Lower South (modern day North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee) from 1720 to 1800 for both colonists and the Native American population of the region. Contrary to the widely held view that GDP per capita grew at a rate of 0.3 to 0.6 percent per year during …