Abstract

"Enhancing the 1907 UK production census plant size data to facilitate international comparisons"

Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics (l.hannah@lse.ac.uk), James Foreman-Peck, Cardiff Business School (foreman-peckj@cardiff.ac.uk)

We propose a rough-and-ready solution to the common lament that prior to 1930 UK censuses of production did not report the sizes of manufacturing plants. Using hitherto neglected Home Office reports on plant numbers and employment and matching some with the industries described in the first (1907) census of production, we produce plausible estimates of mean plant sizes for nearly one hundred industries, many comparable with those long available in foreign manufacturing censuses around 1907.

UK plants were typically larger than those in the US or continental Europe, but UK industries with larger mean plant sizes were only mildly associated with higher labour productivity, despite unsupported assertions to the contrary in the 1907 census final report. There were scale economies in municipal coal gasification (a doubling of inputs, over the input range of the sample, increased output by around 114-115%). But firm size and productivity were not obviously associated in private enterprise shipbuilding, an industry in which the UK continued to dominate global production and productivity (regional location and warship specialisation were more notable productivity drivers than input volumes).

Leslie Hannah is an emeritus professor in the Economic History Department of the London School of Economics.
James Foreman-Peck is an emeritus professor in economics at the Cardiff Business School.