We look at disaggregated imports of various types of equipment to make inferences oncross-country differences in the composition of equipment investment. We make threecontributions. First, we document strikingly large differences in investment composition.Second, we explain the differences as...

The paper explores the link between international economic integration and technological capability in colonial India. The example of iron industry shows that many new ideas and skills flowed into India from Europe, but not all met with commercial success. The essay suggests that in those fields...

Much of the literature on economic change in the post-1945 world is permeated by two ideas: the temporal convergence of per capita incomes across economies and the spatial advance of free trade. For many economists and historians the two are linked: the reduction of trade barriers in the...

This paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy –those in wool and dried codfish– during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern period. The development of early modern long-distance trade was subject to three major...

The paper builds on a method proposed by Geary and Stark (2002) for estimating regional incomes in Victorian Britain. This is modified by using tax data to allocate non-wage income across regions. The results suggest that the coefficient of variation of regional GDP per head was rising rapidly...

This paper provides a new theory of international capital ows. In a frameworkthat integrates factor-proportions-based trade and nancial capital ows, a novel forceemerges: capital tends to ow towards countries that become more specialized incapital-intensive industries. This `composition' eect...

Economic institutions encompassing increasingly sophisticated concepts of risk-sharing and liability flourished in Europe since the High Middle Ages. These innovations occurred in an environment of fragmented local jurisdictions, not within the framework of the territorial state. In this short...