Conjectures of British Investment, Tax Revenues, and Deficit Amounts from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century using the Concept of Economic Surplus

Abstract

This article attempts to estimate trends in the levels of public and private investment, and national government surpluses and deficits from accumulated capital income, taxation, and rents estimated by different economic historians for England and the UK by utilizing the concept of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s economic surplus. The data support historical accounts that income per capita growth begins to increase around the 1600s in Britain, perhaps due to the level of capital, tax, and land income achieving an adequate threshold amount. According to some historians, this would also be about the time of capitalism’s ascent as the dominant economic system in Britain. Even then, dramatic increases in investment and economic growth do not appear until the late eighteenth century when investment and deficits reach even higher levels. The new estimates developed in this article are offered as additional macroeconomic data supplements to works created by other authors and researchers and submitted as a demonstration of the concept of economic surplus and the power of threshold levels of private and public investment. Most of all they also give some support to Baran and Sweezy’s notion of a society’s economic surplus coming from labor exploitation and being used to further investment and government expenditures.