Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 295

In the 1950s it was clear to development economists that economic growth was the result of industrialization; by the 1960s they were equally convinced that agriculture was central to the growth process. Nearly half a century of academic endeavour since then has produced much more evidence, and several new theoretical approaches, but little consensus as to the direction of causation between agricultural growth and growth in the economy as a whole. The more we know about what happened, it seems the less certain we become about why it occurred.

This is the context in which Lains and Pinilla have brought together sixteen other scholars from a dozen countries to examine agricultural productivity differences and the relationship between agricultural productivity and economic growth across Europe. In their introduction, the editors outline the way in which theoretical approaches to the role of agriculture in economic growth have changed. The only non- European contributors, Professors Olmstead and Rhode, also examine the insights and limitations of a variety of growth models produced by agricultural economists, and find most of them unsatisfactory, generally for want of testing against historical experience. Much of the remainder of the book therefore carries out this testing for the period since 1870, since, it is argued (p.11), the ‘single major event in regard to agriculture’ over Europe as a whole was the rapid expansion of wheat exports to the continent after that date. A further chapter on world trade documents Europe’s import dominance at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it took 75 per cent of all world food imports, and its relative rise as a food exporter by the end of the century. This implies that as European agriculture’s contribution to the economy as a whole has declined, its output and productivity has increased. Broadberry, after comparing productivity levels in Britain and other parts of western Europe, demonstrates that economic growth was greatest in those countries that moved most rapidly out of agriculture, so that the principal contribution of agriculture to economic growth appears to be the release of labour to other sectors of the economy. Since most western European countries had less than five per cent of their labour forces in agriculture by the 1990s, where the figures in southern and eastern Europe were generally between 15 and 25 per cent, this suggests a core/periphery split, which is how the rest of the book is organized. In the core countries of western Europe (those analysed here are the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France and Italy) the agricultural labour force had declined, on average, to about a third of the total by 1939, and so the chapters on these countries cover the period 19o0–39. In most of the peripheral countries (Poland, Hungary, Spain, Portugal and Greece) much of this structural change was still going on after the Second World War, and consequently their histories are discussed up to the 1970s. In the case of Turkey, where the process is still going on, the discussion is taken up to the year 2000.

Each of the studies of individual countries examines this relationship between overall economic growth, agricultural output, and the level of inputs to agriculture, and especially agricultural labour. Many of the chapters also include estimates of total factor productivity in agriculture. The book has the expected virtue of one written by a collection of national experts, in that it brings together an enormous amount of up-to-date, extensively referenced, and carefully considered data. At the same time, it avoids the problem that often bedevils collections of essays, because the editors have been careful to ensure that each author covers more or less the same topics in a consistent way. The publishers, on the other hand, faced with a text mostly written by non-native English speakers, might have been more careful in their copy editing of an expensive book to remove some of the more obvious spelling errors (‘deptridden agriculture’ on p.297) and infelicitous phrases (‘the 1879 cereals bad harvest’ on p.213). A concluding chapter to consider the findings in detail would also have been useful. The editors do indeed summarize the main findings of each chapter in their introduction, and argue that the diversity of European experiences make generalizing difficult (p.20), but, given the variety of theories and models outlined at the beginning of the book, it would have been useful to see some attempt to discuss them in the light of its empirical findings. Nonetheless, we should be grateful for what we have been given, which is a rich and fascinating collection that students will mine for ideas, data, and references, and researchers will ignore at their peril.