White Population, Labor Force and Extensive Growth of the New England Economy in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Economic historians have always recognized the importance of changes in population to any investigation of economic growth or well-being. The payments to labor in every economy, even the highly industrialized modern economies, always constitute the bulk of national income when figured via the factor payments method. Hence what happens to the size and rate of compensation of the labor force is crucial to any economic history. With this in mind we present below new decade population and labor force estimates as a first step toward understanding the overall growth of seventeenth-century New England.