Comprehensive Investment (CI) may provide an indicator of future changes in a country's per capita consumption. The authors explore the utility of the CI indicator for Australia by constructing CI data since 1861 and by estimating their relationship with changes in future consumption over periods of 50 years ahead. The CI measures include changes in natural, produced and human capital, and make allowance for exogenous technological progress. The results are used to consider how Australia's natural capital exploitation influenced the consumption of future generations. Further, the authors gauge if low CI relative to other leading OECD countries resulted in lower consumption levels in Australia over time than feasible, had it saved more.

The return of growth theory to center stage in mainstream economics provides opportunities for historians to reconsider the forces shaping longer-term economic development. A key motivation for developing new growth modeling strategies lay in the desire to reestablish contact between theory and the empirics of economic growth. By postulating diminishing returns to capital, the traditional neoclassical paradigm precludes the sustaining of per capita growth in the absence of exogenous technological progress. Since historical records of economic development offer scant evidence for declining per capita growth, disenchantment grew with a theoretical perspective that leaves the crucial part of the empirical record unexplained, prompting a search for alternative modeling strategies.

The origins of this exchange stem from an important paper by N. F. R. Crafts, Steven Leybourne, and Terence Mills, which argues that underlying trends in British industrial output for the period 1700 to 1913 are stochastic rather than linearly deterministic. Using parsimonious methods, we propose an alternative view that the output series have alternating stochastic properties. Specifically we distinguish the period 1780 to 1851 as an Industrial Revolution epoch during which shocks had long-term effects. Out model simplifies to help understand the complexities of the Industrial Revolution, and we agree with Clive Granger and Zhuanxin Ding, that “While it is correct to search over a specific set of parsimonious models … the model so achieved is, at best, an approximation to the truth”.

A downward trend in British coal-mining productivity was reversed between the world wars. Declining productivity before 1914 was accompanied by wide regional differences, especially at the coalface. Scotland attained the best overall. productivity, while coalface productivity was highest in Durham and Northumberland. Regional differences narrowed by the 1920s but re-emerged in the 1930s, as mines in the North Midlands outpaced the productivity gains made elsewhere. Only a multifaceted interpretation can explain these distinctive patterns—over time, between regions, and at different stages of the coal-mining operation.