This paper documents industrial output growth around the poor periphery (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa) between 1870 and 2007. We find that although the roots of rapid peripheral industrialization stretch into the late 19th...

This paper documents industrial output and labor productivity growth around the poor periphery 1870-1975 (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia). Intensive and extensive industrial growth accelerated there over this critical century. The...

It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle has been borne out in some econometric tests of the determinants of economic performance...

A new technique for estimating countries' de facto exchange rate regimes synthesizes two approaches. One approach estimates the implicit de facto basket weights in an OLS regression of the local currency value rate against major currency values. Here the hypothesis is a basket peg with little...

Poor countries are more volatile than rich countries, and we know this volatility impedes their growth. We also know that commodity price volatility is a key source of those shocks. This paper explores commodity and manufactures price over the past three centuries to answer three questions: Has...

The paper offers a new approach to estimate de facto exchange rate regimes, a synthesis of two techniques. One is a technique that the authors have used in the past to estimate implicit de facto weights when the hypothesis is a basket peg with little flexibility. The second is a technique used...

If we have learned anything from the recent outpouring of empirical growth equations is that life is far too complex to expect unconditional' convergence among all countries and at" all times. This fact motivates two questions. First, why has it taken economists so long to learn" the same lesson...

W. Arthur Lewis argued that a new international economic order emerged between 1870 and 1913, and that global terms of trade forces produced rising primary product specialization and de-industrialization in the poor periphery. More recently, modern economists argue that volatility reduces growth...

Countries' geographic characteristics have important effects on their trade, and are plausibly uncorrelated with other determinants of their incomes. This paper therefore constructs measures of the geographic component of countries' trade and uses those measures to obtain instrumental variables...

Most countries in the periphery specialized in the export of just a handful of primary products for most of their history. Some of these commodities have been more volatile than others, and those with more volatile prices have grown slowly relative both to the industrial leaders and to other...