Current orthodoxy suggests that the Industrial Revolution began in Europe because European institutions promoted comparatively high levels of market efficiency. This Paper compares the actual efficiency of markets in Europe and China, two regions of the world that were relatively advanced in the...

How much of China’s recent economic performance can be attributed to market-oriented reforms introduced in the last two decades? A long-run perspective may be important for understanding the process of economic development occurring today. This Paper compares the integration of rice markets in...

This paper examines the theoretical underpinning of contemporary trade policies through a social economics lens. The paper offers a social economic critique of the theory of comparative advantage and the recently developed theory of comparative institutional advantage. Subsequently, the paper...

We estimate the effect of international trade on average labour productivity across countries. Our empirical approach relies on a summary measure of trade that, we argue, is preferable to the one conventionally used on both theoretical and empirical grounds. In contrast to the marginally...