Our study employs a difference-in-differences technique to test two channels of Dutch disease effects predicted by the theory. First, if there is a deindustrialization in resource-rich countries, then the outflow of resources from the manufacturing sector should put industries with higher...

With industrialisation and rationalisation of the Western economy, the scale of production became larger, production costs declined and competitiveness rose (Kloosterman and van der Leun 2004). It was thought that Economies of scale would weed out small-business. This seems plausible: As a...

We measure technological progress in oceanic shipping by using a large database of daily log entries from ships of the British and Dutch navies and East India Companies to estimate daily sailing speed in different wind conditions from 1750 to 1850. Against the consensus, dating back to North...

The long-run evolution of per-capita income exhibits a structural break often associated with the Industrial Revolution. We follow Mokyr (2002) and embed the idea that this structural break reflects a regime switch in the evolution of technological knowledge into a dynamic framework, using Airy...

It is often assumed that recent success in the high-technology software industry will lead India's development. However, evidence suggests that basic manufacturing industry is stagnant. This paper proposes a mechanism that ties these two trends together. A big-push type of model, featuring...

Africa should industrialize. Without structural change it cannot sustain recent growth. Economies with more diverse and sophisticated industrial sectors tend to grow faster. But since 1980 Africa has deindustrialized. The paper shows that between 1975 and 2005 the size, diversity and...