Although Japanese economic growth after the Meiji Restoration is often characterised as a gradual process of trend acceleration, comparison with the United States suggests that catching-up only really started after 1950, due to the unusually dynamic performance of the US economy before 1950. A...

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...

A number of writers have recently questioned whether labour productivity or per capita incomes were ever higher in the United Kingdom than in the United States. We show that although the United States already had a substantial labour productivity lead in industry as early as 1840, especially in...