Irish GDP between the Famine and the First World War: Estimates Based on a Dynamic Factor Model

A major issue in Irish economic history is the lack of national accounts before the interwar period. This paper constructs new annual estimates of real GDP between 1842 and 1913 based on a novel two-stage econometric approach. Our results show that while living standards approximately tripled in this period, development was uneven with contractions in economic activity not only during the Great Famine but also between the late 1890s and the First World War. As a proof of concept, we also apply our methodology to Swedish data. The resulting estimates closely match existing historical national accounts.