Estimating early American gross domestic product

Over the past half-century, there have been several attempts to appraise the performance of the economy of the United States during the colonial and early national periods. With one notable exception, the estimates have been retrospective extrapolations from our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the operation of the early nineteenth-century U.S. economy. These efforts are difficult to assess because they have been founded upon dissimilar assumptions, stated in different terms, using varying points of departure. Considering all such estimates side by side, expressing them in comparable terms, and critiquing their potential conflicts seems a good way to begin any attempt to get a better grasp of the economic development of early America. As a critical first step, all estimates discussed in this article have been restated in terms of 1840 dollars, the base year employed by some (Goldin and Lewis 1980) but not by all of these studies. Values expressed in other terms are reduced to this base year using a commodity price index that extends well back into the middle of the seventeenth century (McCusker 2000). With 1840 as our base year, the estimates of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economic performance can be and are linked with those for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making long-term comparisons possible.