This paper uses a sample of 36 countries for the time period 1990-2011 in order to examine the relationship between countries’ electricity consumption from renewable sources and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) levels. Several nonparametric techniques are applied to investigate the effect of...

Two centuries ago the world’s economy stood at the present level of Chad. Two centuries later the world supports more than six-and-half times more people. Starvation worldwide is at an all-time low, and falling. Literacy and life expectancy are at all-time highs, and rising. How did average...

Using time series data, this paper investigates China’s carbon emissions during 1960-2006, with particular focus on the direct role of growth and in connection to trade and the value added by various sectors like agriculture, industry and services. Our empirical results indicate the presence...

By applying conditional and unconditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models along side with statistical inference using bootstrap techniques; this paper investigates the link between China’s carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) environmental efficiency and its economic growth (measured in GNI...

“Commercialization” and “monetization” dance with stage theories from Smith to modern growth theory. The sheer growth of traded or the sheer growth of money, though, do not an Industrial Revolution make. The ill-named “Price Revolution,” for example, came from American gold, not from...

Why did the North-Sea folk suddenly get so rich, get so much cargo? The answers seems not to be that supply was brought into equilibrium with demand---the curves were moving out at breakneck pace. Reallocation is not the key. Language is, with its inherent creativity. The Bourgeois Revaluation...

It is a materialist prejudice common in scholarship from 1890 to 1980 that economic results must have economic causes. But ideas caused the modern world. The point can be made by looking through each of the materialist explanations, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist...

Thrift was not the cause of the Industrial Revolution or its astonishing follow on. For one thing, every human society must practice thrift, and pre-industrial Europe, with its low yield-seed ratios, did so on a big scale. British thrift during the Industrial Revolution, for another, was rather...

Since trade was not an engine, neither was a part of trade, such as the trade in slaves. And certainly the profits from the trade did not finance the Industrial Revolution. Imperialism, too, was a mere part of trade, and despite the well-deserved guilt that Europeans feel in having perpetrated...