Between 1890 and 1938, the public share of total spending rose to unprecedented peacetime levels in many Western countries. This development has been explained by either (i) a shift in the demand for public goods or (ii) a restructuring of the state to transfer income. However, neither...

Comment peut-on expliquer que la part des dépenses publiques dans le PNB en temps de paix ait doublé dans plusieurs économies occidentales entre 1910 et 1938? Les dates éloignées de l'introduction du suffrage universel pour les hommes et l'évidence d'un protectionnisme croissant pendant...

Neither democracy nor globalization can explain the doubling of the peacetime public share in many Western countries between World Wars I and II. Here we examine two other explanations that are consistent with the timing of the observed changes, namely, (1) a shift in the demand for public goods...

What causes economic change? Traditionally, economists have answered that the explanation lies in exogenous shocks to technology, factor stocks, or preferences. In the last half-decade of his career, the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis (1894-1952) proposed an alternative approach - a...

Two different approaches have been proposed to explain the rise and decline of industries. Schumpeter (1942/1947) argued that creative destruction was a necessary part of innovation. Rybczynski (1955) demonstrated in a two-factor model that an increase in one factor leads to a decrease in output...

Overs the past millennium, each of the three centuries of most rapid demographic growth in the West Coincided with the diffusion of a new communications technology. This paper examines the hypothesis of Harold Innis (1894-1952) that there is two-way feeback between such innovations and economic...