Showing 1 - 10 of 17
The size and strength of the Royal Navy experienced a punctuated evolution into the largest and most powerful Navy in the world by 1815.Most historians tend to represent its superiority in conflicts at sea as an indication of several factors that would be conceptualized by economists as...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870392
Recent empirical studies claim to have identified roots of Africa’s poverty in its colonial past, particularly in the ‘extractive’ or ‘illegitimate’ institutions that the colonial powers bequeathed. While taking a similar quantitative approach this paper accepts the view of many...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870402
This paper tests whether the so-called ‘reach of the market’ helps to explain ‘why Europe’ and ‘why north-western Europe’. By looking at grain markets from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, this study concludes that the process of commodity market integration...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870461
The paper explores the link between international economic integration and technological capability in colonial India. The example of iron industry shows that many new ideas and skills flowed into India from Europe, but not all met with commercial success. The essay suggests that in those fields...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870462
When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870487
The Great War of 1914-18 constituted a major rupture for the economies of Europe in several respects. It marked the end of almost a century of uninterrupted economic growth. It ended a long period of near-universal currency stability, and set in motion a painful process of de-globalisation. It...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870493
We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the post-war shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870496
Today efficient states can be represented as sovereign authorities governing successful economies that provide high, stable and rising standards of welfare for their citizens. Such states emerged slowly and painfully over centuries of geopolitical rivalry and conflict among aristocracies for...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870506
Recent research on international productivity comparisons has focused on the discrepancies between benchmark comparisons and time series extrapolations from other benchmarks. For a 1907 benchmark, Stephen Broadberry and Carsten Burhop (2007) find German manufacturing to be only slightly ahead of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870508
In this paper, the problem of why low-purchasing power silver coins depreciated relative to high-purchasing power gold coins is examined. The standard explanation by Sargent and Velde is refuted. It is argued that the relative stability of gold was due to the demand from consumers able to detect...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005870510