Spain's Historical National Accounts: Expenditure and Output, 1850-2015

This essay offers a new set of historical GDP estimates from the demand and supply sides that revises and expands those in Prados de la Escosura (2003) and provides the basis to investigate Spain’s long run economic growth. It presents a reconstruction of production and expenditure series for the century prior to the introduction of modern national accounts. Then, it splices available national accounts sets over the period 1958-2015 through interpolation, as an alternative to conventional retropolation. The resulting national accounts series are linked to the ‘pre-statistical era’ estimates providing yearly series for GDP and its components since 1850. On the basis of new population estimates, GDP per head is derived. Trends in GDP per head are, then, drawn and, using new employment estimates, decomposed into labour productivity and the amount of work per person, and placed into international perspective.