India was a major player in the world export market for textiles in the early 18th century, but by the middle of the 19th century it had lost all of its export market and much of its domestic market. Other local industries also suffered some decline, and India underwent secular...

This Paper argues that a geographical perspective is fundamental to understanding comparative economic development in the context of globalization. Central to this view is the role of agglomeration in productivity performance; size and location matter. The tools of the new economic geography are...

This Paper documents the size and timing of the world intercontinental trade boom following the great voyages in the 1490s of Columbus, da Gama and their followers. Indeed, a trade boom followed over the next three centuries. But what was its cause? The conventional wisdom in the world history...

There are two contrasting views of pre-19th century trade and globalization. First there are the world history scholars like Andre Gunder Frank who attach globalization ‘big bang' significance to the dates 1492 (Christopher Columbus stumbles on America in search of spices) and 1498 (Vasco da...

We consider a Heckscher-Ohlin model in which goods and factors of production can be traded, but trade involves transactions costs. Goods trade alone will not equalize factor prices, so there is an incentive for trade in factors of production. Whether goods or factors are traded depends on...

A recent endogenous growth literature has focused on the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages were linked to factor endowments, to one where modern growth has broken that link. In this Paper we present evidence on another, related phenomenon: the dramatic reversal in...

Most countries in the periphery specialized in the export of just a handful of primary products for most of their history. Some of these commodities have been more volatile than others, and those with more volatile prices have grown slowly relative both to the industrial leaders and to other...

An important element of the cost of distance is time taken in delivering final and intermediate goods. We argue that time costs are qualitatively different from direct monetary costs such as freight charges. The difference arises because of uncertainty. Unsynchronized deliveries can disrupt...

This Paper studies the size and number of industrial clusters that will arise in a multi-country world in which, because of increasing returns to scale, one sector has a propensity to cluster. It compares the equilibrium with the world welfare maximum, showing that the equilibrium will generally...

We consider a model with a continuum of industries in which agglomeration forces cause each industry to concentrate in a single country. We study the division of industries between countries and show that this division is not unique, so that even with identical countries and symmetric industries...