In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest among growth economists in General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). A GPT can be defined as "a technology that initially has much scope for improvement and evntually comes to be widely used, to have many uses, and to have many Hicksian and...

In an influential article Saxonhouse and Wright argued that the quality of local cottonwas the single most important factor in explaining national preferences for ring ormule spinning. For Britain, they argue that mills using more flexible mule spindlescould exploit arbitrage opportunities...