Irish GDP between the Famine and the First World War

Abstract

A major issue in Irish economic history is the lack of historical national accounts before the interwar period. This paper addresses the gap with new annual estimates of GDP between 1841 and 1913 based on an original two-step methodology that makes use of existing time series data and of new benchmark estimates of GDP for six census years (Geary and Stark, 2015). On an aggregate basis, the results portray a slowly-growing economy that suffered output losses of a quarter during the Great Famine; on a per capita basis, the standard of living doubled over the period as a whole.