We investigate the early development of English cotton spinning by analysing about 700 bankruptcies and 1300 dissolutions of partnership reported in the London Gazette, 1770-1840. The data show three temporal cycles, peaking in the early to mid-1800s, in the later 1820s and again in the later...

The growth of the Belgian economy since 1945 is surveyed with emphasis on the distinction between open and sheltered sectors. Relatively slow growth to around 1960 is explained by a move away from traditionally liberal industrial policies that began in the crisis of the 1930s, by the squeeze on...