In early modern north-western Europe, real wages declined while GDP per capita was on the increase. In contrast, wage growth in Tokugawa Japan went hand in hand with output growth. Based on this finding, the paper revisits Thomas Smith’s thesis on ‘Pre-modern Economic Growth: Japan and the...

Thomas Carlyle’s writings are an important conduit for thetransmission of French and German ideas into England duringthe nineteenth century – and Carlyle’s antagonistic relationshipwith the French Enlightenment would have a significant anddurable effect upon Victorian attitudes to French...

Sir Francis Bacon explored as a medical question the issue of how human life spans might be returned to the near-thousand years enjoyed by Adam and the Patriarchs. Extended old age seemed feasible: reports told of people living well into their centenary. Meanwhile, New World natives were said to...

This paper revisits the issue of the productivity performance of pre-World War I Britain’s railway system with an improved dataset and with modern time-series econometrics. We find a slowdown in TFP growth between 1850 and 1870, after which it stabilized at about 1.1%. An analysis of...

The usual way to evaluate the implications of new technology for economic growth is through growth accounting techniques. This methodology has, of course, been widely employed to examine the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) and the results have dominated thinking on the...

We examine associations of mass media and information and communicationstechnologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on some economicdevelopment outcomes. We .nd that several mass media and ICT penetration variablesare negatively associated with three development outcomes: corruption,...

“Light” welfare states were perceived by some as one source of East Asian economicdynamism. Didier Jacobs has examined the strengths of several East Asian socialwelfare systems and the challenges they face after the financial crisis.Japan has a fully-fledged social welfare system. Yet her...

Among other areas such as housing and urban renewal, economic development was seen as a key factor in the recovery in Leipzig. The City Department of Economic Development and the Economic Initiative Mitteldeutschland, a lobby group representing large regional employers, designed a cluster...

Europe is a continent of cities with a remarkable history of cultural inspiration, wealth creation, social andpolitical dynamism. But in the late-20th century, many former industrial cities entered a period of steep decline,losing most of their manufacturing jobs and many of their economic...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of politi-cal competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. Wetest the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. Inthese data, we …nd robust evidence that lack of political competitionin a state is...