When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...

Although industrial production and growth in Greece during the interwar periodhas attracted considerable attention, there has not been any serious challengeeither in qualitative or quantitative terms to the orthodoxy established in theperiod itself. The literature usually sees the 1920s as a...

By the late 19th century, the export of natural ice from Norway to Britain was a major trade, fuelled by the growing British consumption of ice. Although new technology eventually allowed the production of artificial ice, natural ice retained a strong market position until World War I. This...

The period of 1840 (when the Opium War broken out) till now is commonly regarded as China’s modern era, ‘modern’ in terms of China’s departure from its original growth and developmental path. In this context, the term modern has been intimately associated with something alien to the...

Growth accounting consists of a set of calculations resulting in a measure ofoutput growth, a measure of input growth, and their difference, most commonlyreferred to as total factor productivity (TFP) growth. It can be performed atthe level of the plant, firm, industry, or aggregate economy.[...]

This article, based on two books (Barr and Diamond 2008, forthcoming), sets out a series of principles for pension design rooted in economic theory: pension systems have multiple objectives, analysis should consider the pension system as a whole, analysis should be framed in a second-best...

This article offers a critical review of recent literature on Chinese legal tradition and argues that some subtle but fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese legal traditions are highly relevant to our explanation of the economic divergence in the modern era. By elucidating the...