Argentine industrialization : an introduction -- Manufacturing productivity and concentration, 1895-1935 -- Argentina's investment in imported machinery, 1890-1930 -- Merchant finance groups in Argentine industrialization -- Manufacturing profits and strategies, 1904-1930 -- Political economy of...

Transport in Nineteenth-Century Brazil -- Railroad policy, finance, and expansion -- The direct gains from railroad freight services -- Railroad passenger benefits -- Railroads and Brazilian economic structure -- Dividing the surplus : subsidies, regulation, and profits

This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from...

This research provides an explanation for high literacy, economic growth and societal developments in the Netherlands in the period before the Dutch Republic. We establish a link between the Brethren of the Common Life (BCL), a religious community founded by Geert Groote in the city of Deventer...

The Axial Age, which lasted between 800 B. C. E. and 200 B. C. E., covers an era in which the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in various geographic areas, and all three major monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were born between 1200 B. C....

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...