Japanese GDP per capita grew at an annual rate of 0.04 per cent between 725 and 1874, but the growth was episodic, with the increase in per capita income concentrated in three periods, 1150-1280, 1450-1600 and after 1730, interspersed with periods of stable per capita income. There is a...

This Paper studies growth and inequality in China and India – two economies that account for a third of the world’s population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the Paper calibrates the impact each has no different welfare indicators and on the...

This paper provides estimates of Indian GDP constructed from the output side for the pre-1871 period, and combines them with population estimates to track changes in living standards. Indian per capita GDP declined steadily between 1600 and 1871. As British living standards increased from the...

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...

This paper identifies the leading country-industry combinations that define the world technology frontier in manufacturing. Using a unique industry dataset compiled from EU KLEMS and PATSTAT, it explores which countries and industries reveal the most efficient innovation processes. We combine a...

The economic slowdown in the 70s in Latin America and Japan in the late 90s, generated a growing skepticism about the role of industrial policy in the process of economic development. Yet, new considerations have emerged over the recent period, which invite us to revisit the issue. This paper...

We document an empirical relationship between the cross-country adoption of technologies and the degree of long-term historical relatedness between human populations. Historical relatedness is measured using genetic distance, a measure of the time since two populations’ last common ancestors....

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and...

This paper studies the barriers to the diffusion of development across countries over the very long-run. We find that genetic distance, a measure associated with the amount of time elapsed since two populations' last common ancestors, bears a statistically and economically significant...