The article aims to present and discuss estimates of levels of human and social capital in Italy’s regions over the long term, i.e. roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day. The results are linked to newly available evidence for regional value added in order...

This paper provides a historical look at how the multilateral trading system has coped with the challenge of shocks and shifts. By shocks we mean sudden jolts to the world economy in the form of financial crises and deep recessions, or wars and political conflicts. By shifts we mean slow-moving,...

Medical knowledge – defined broadly to include both its private and public forms – has been the driving force behind the historical transitions that have raised life expectancy in modern Europe. Advances in knowledge, rather than better nutrition (particularly the escape from caloric...

This study investigates the impact of joint-stock banks on the rationalisation of the British interwar steel industry. A new panel data set of steel firm characteristics covering 1920 to 1938 is used to document rationalization and bank involvement, including interlocking directorships, with...

Bad ethics can make for bad economic outcomes. Bad ethics are defined hedonically as the infliction of pain on others for private advantage. The infliction of pain is often justified by ‘Just World Theories’, which state that everyone gets what they deserve. Market liberalism (and its...

Although Nigeria's Benin region was a major rubber producer in 1960, the industry faltered before 1921. I use labour scarcity and state capacity to explain why rubber did not take hold in this period. The government was unable to protect Benin's rubber forests from over-exploitation. Plantations...

Housing was the major domestic priority of all postwar UK governments. By 1970 the physical conditions of British housing had been transformed; by the 1990s seventy per cent of households in England owned their own homes. Yet in 2012 there were still parts of many cities that deserved labeling as...

This paper analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. In Malaya, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines, the issue of military scrip to pay for resources and...

Adam Smith rejected Mandeville’s invisible-hand doctrine of ‘private vices, publick benefits’. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments his model of the ‘impartial spectator’ is driven by not by sympathy for other people, but by their approbation. Approbation needs to be authenticated, and in...

Western governments typically pay out some 30 percent of GDP for social purposes. This is financed by taxation on a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) basis. How efficient are these transfers, and can market or other mechanisms do it better? The problem arises since no individual stands alone. During the...