Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- I. Economic Problems and Development in the Long Run -- II. The Impact of the Colonial Heritage on the Economic Development in the 19th and 20th Centuries -- III. International Economic Relations and their Impact on Economy, State, and Society...

Main description: Few observers of Mexico and Brazil in the 1930s, or South Korea and Taiwan in the mid-1950s, would have predicted that these nations would become economic "miracles" several decades later. These newly industrializing countries (NICs) challenge much of our conventional wisdom...

Using subnational historical data, this paper establishes the within country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of pre-colonial population density, new measures of present regional per capita...