Retrospective National Accounts

At the same time as the Cambridge Growth Project (CGP), with Stone as ‘chairman’ and Alan Brown, then Barker, as ‘chief executives was modelling, disaggregating, and projecting national accounts into the future, another Faculty colleague was tracing the national income accounts back into history. The historical dimension was published in a 1972 book by Feinstein (1972), one of three (extraordinarily energetic) qualified accountants on the Cambridge Faculty in the 1960s (the others were Cliff Pratten and Geoffrey Whittington—see Section 3). Stone had already in the 1940s initiated a project to compile retrospective national income accounts along Stone-Meade lines. In his chapter on Feinstein in this volume and in Offer (2008), Avner Offer describes the challenges this project faced, its long gestation, and Feinstein’s achievement in bringing to completion a national income series stretching back from 1965 to 1855: it reveals ‘the structure and size of the British economy from 1965 and back to Victorian times. This makes it possible to evaluate how well the economy has performed at any point in the past hundred and fifty years, and to compare it with other periods and other countries’ (ibid.: 3).^[1] Feinstein then joined forces with Robin Matthews and John Odling-Smee to deploy his data in analyses of the sources of British economic growth (Matthews et al. 1982).

• [1] Offer makes clear Feinstein’s debt to other Cambridge researchers with an accounting bent: ‘It was a goldenage for the study of trends in the Victorian economy, a good deal of it at Cambridge’ (Offer 2008: 5),with major Faculty publications including Deane and Cole (1962) and Mitchell (1988).