Abstract
Polish lands in 19th century are usually located in the economic peripheries of Europe. However there are no usable datasets of Polish GDP for this period to verify this hypothesis. The main problem is lack of reliable and comparable macroeconomic data from country divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia. The main goal of this research was to propose the method based on the urbanization data set to estimate the GDP of Polish territories and to verify the hypothesis on the peripheral development of Polish lands. In result the new estimates on GDP per capita were established, that allowed to confirm the hypothesis of semi-peripheral development of Polish territories in 19th century and slow process of catching-up with the core economies.
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Notes
1 An attempt to describe the development of Poland in a European context has been made by Wolf (Citation2009).
2 For the preliminary estimates for the shorter period of time (1870–1910) see Bukowski et al. (Citation2018).
3 Usually it is identified with the manufacturer’s industry, though as Hagen (Citation1963) has it written, industrialization may also be initialized by small entrepreneurs, using new technologies.
4 The Rosés–Wolf database on regional GDP and Employment statistics is available at http://www.ehes.org/resources.html
5 The regional GDP estimation for Russia for the year 1897 prepared also Markevich (Citation2018) in his unpublished paper. In the results he included the governorates of Congress Kingdom.
6 The OLS regression output for 1880 with GDP pc as dependent variable is GDPpc = 686.5 (1.93)+98.14 (8.20) x Urbrate, R2 = 0.86; the t-stat are given in parentheses. The OLS output for 1910 is GDPpc = 837.3 (1.82) + 105.5 (6.36) x Urbrate, R2 = 0.77.
7 The census data sources for total population and urban population for German part: Statistik des Deutschen Reiches: vol. 240 Neue Folge (NF) for the years 1905 and 1910, vol. 151 NF for the years 1895 and 1900, vol. 32 NF for the years 1885 and 1880, vol. 57 Alte Folge (AF) for the years 1880 and 1875, vol. 14 AF for the year 1871, Preussische Statistik: vol. 121 for the year 1890, vol. 66 for the year 1880.
8 For the German part we completed and corrected Jelonek’s data using the German censuses from the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Note 7).