This essay discusses recent progress that has been made in understanding the connection between health and industrialization in 8 developed countries. Because earlier efforts have been stymied by lack of reliable measures of mortality, the most recent work utilizes average height obtained from...

Manufacturing has made an important contribution to raising living standards in many parts of the world. Concerns about premature deindustrialization have made some observers skeptical about the potential for manufacturing to play this role in Africa. But employment in African manufacturing has...

This paper reports estimates of labor and total factor productivity, for thirteen manufacturing industries in the Northeast over the period from 1820 to 1860. It finds that although the highly mechanized and capital-intensive industries, such as cotton and wool textiles, realized somewhat more...

This paper utilizes a survey of the US manufacturing firms from 1832 to investigate the structure of manufacturing investment during early industrialization. Although several manufacturing industries, such as cotton textiles, depart from the pattern, most appear to have devoted the hulk of their...

Trends in BMI values are estimated by centiles of the US adult population by birth cohorts 1886-1986 stratified by ethnicity. The highest centile increased by some 18 to 22 units in the course of the century while the lowest ones increased by merely 1 to 3 units. Hence, the BMI distribution...

We re-examine the role of financial market development in the intersectoral allocation of resources. Specifically, we propose the use of a new methodology that looks at the co-movement in growth rates across pairs of countries to examine the role of financial development in allowing firms to...

This essay places the debate over human welfare during industrialization in the context of very long-term economic developments by examining an important aspect of living standards--health and nutrition--since the Middle Ages. I use average stature determined from military records along with a...

This paper reviews the evidence regarding the main trends in the height of the British population since the early eighteenth century. We argue that the average heights of successive birth cohorts of British males increased slowly between the middle of the eighteenth century and the first quarter...

The United States differed dramatically from Britain in the way manufacturing was organized during early industrialization. Even before widespread mechanization, American production was almost exclusively from centralized plants, whereas the British and other European economies were...