the United Kingdom and become the leading world economy. During the past 25 years, the four countries have also … extent also to France and Japan, a relative decline that was interrupted by the second world war (WW2); (iii) the remarkable … and knowledge spillovers. Most recently (in 2006), before the current financial world crisis, hourly labor productivity …

-periods, and over the longer term with respect to the growth in the size of their economies. Most important, the comparison of an …

firms (entrepreneurship) and the average quality of management (meritocracy). Legal reform also reduces financial … improve meritocracy at the expense of entrepreneurship. As a result, legal reform encounters less political opposition than …

, and economic historians. Frequently used global data come from the Penn World Table (PWT) and the World Bank's World … Development Indicators; a substantial fraction of the world is also covered in the PPP accounts produced by the OECD and the … practical problems of implementing it. All of these data are underpinned by the International Comparison Program (ICP), which …

across the world. We do so by calculating how many years ago these technologies were used in the U.S. at the same intensity …

We suggest that the geographical patterns of income differences across the world have deep underpinnings. We emphasize … characteristics of economies. Per capita incomes differ around the world in no small part because of sharp differences across regions … middle income; the distribution of economic activity around the world today; the patterns of growth between 1960 and 2010 …