Economic growth and sectoral developments, 1800-1914

This chapter explores the patterns of economic growth, stagnation and structural change in 19th-century Central, East and Southeast Europe. Economic growth in the region was a process characterized by pronounced annual fluctuations in activity and, in some instances, longer phases of expansion alternating with periods of stagnation. The impression of Hungarian and Romanian growth as particularly strong in the given regional context is confirmed, and so is that of a comparatively weak record for Bulgaria and Russia. In Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, an increasingly market-orientated agriculture developed during the period 1830–1914. However, the transition of the agricultural sector to modern, that is productivity-driven, output growth as a key ingredient in substantial structural change required a growing capacity of industry to absorb the emerging agricultural labour surplus. Between 1860 and 1914, no other part of Europe experienced a higher rate of population growth than South-East Europe, where demographic stagnation turned into a sustained expansion.