Traditional Versus Revisionist: The Case of the Industrial Revolution in Sweden, 1830-1980

Abstract: This empirical paper uses modern methodology and techniques to analyze old and ongoing scholarly disagreements about the nature of Industrial Revolution. It analyzes the Industrial Revolution in Sweden and to find out whether it supports the traditional or revisionist view of the Industrial Revolution through quantitative time-series methodology and techniques such as cointegration analysis, Vector Error Correction Model, which isolates short-run from long-run relationships between variables under study, and Vector Autoregressive Model. Using data on labor productivity in Manufacturing and Building and Construction Industries as well as data on real product wage – nominal wage deflated by the price of the product – in Manufacturing Industry and Handicrafts, the results in this paper suggest that the “revolution” was not immediately widespread as many of the short-run effects in productivity in one sector on the productivity in other sectors are economically and statistically insignificant. The evidences presented in this paper support the revisionist rather than the traditional view of the Industrial Revolution.