The Great Famine of Ireland from 1845-51 ranks as one of the most lethal of all time, claiming approximately one eighth of the country’s population. Utilizing Famine Relief Commission reports to develop a micro-level dataset of blight severity, I find that in the short run, districts more...

Although lateral hiring (LH) has increasingly come to characterise today’s global labour market, past studies have largely overlooked how the practice unfolds as industry structure evolves. This article draws on the human capital theory to examine the evolution of LH and skills formations in...

The author argues that although the collapse of the Doha “Development” Round in early summer of 2006 was triggered by the refusal of the United States to agree to the reduction of the ceiling on the amount of domestic subsidies paid to the US farmers, there were some fundamental reasons...

The object of the paper is to place the present issues of world poverty, development, demographic change into proper historical perspective, considering the specificities of present times concerning economic and demographic developments, as well as the international relations associated with...

Imperial China used an empire-wide system of examinations to select civil servants. Using a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator, we show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To...

Abstract Following closely my remit, this paper reviews and assesses Asian economic development in the recent post-1980 period, as well as over the somewhat longer time-span since WWII. Its chief purpose is to draw analytical and policy implications from this experience. This is a challenging...

Utopian socialists believed that socialism is inevitable because it is a more rational system to organize production and life, a system more in line with the “good” nature of human beings. Marxism rejected this reasoning replacing it with what is known as historical materialism: social...

Globalization is not a new phenomenon, but already occurred centuries ago. The first half of the 20th century seems an interruption of the move towards free trade. After World War II, however, the move to free trade resumed and gave rise to a sustained period of high economic growth in most...

In general, most countries of the former Eastern bloc have experienced poor growth performance and large increases in income inequality during the transition process. The most obvious success story in the process of transition to date has been Poland, which has outstripped other transition...

Poland undertook a rapid and decisive set of political and economic reforms starting in 1989-90, a period that has become known as the big bang. A widely held view is that, in all of the transition economies, the economic upheaval associated with the process of transition has led to substantial...