Political independence is usually associated with an attempt to reduce economic dependency on the dominant or former colonial power. For most of the early period since Irish independence the attempt to reduce exposure to the UK was implemented through tariff protection and restrictions on...

Do new school types focusing on practical and business-related knowledge lead to increased economic performance? To analyze this question, this paper examines the introduction of two types of modern secondary education, the Gewerbeschule and its successor, the Realschule, in nineteenth-century...

This paper presents a new consistent yearly series of gross income (between-group) inequality Ginis for four occupational categories in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela over the period 1900-2011 using a newly assembled wage dataset.  The approach used differentiates...

Stock prices move together more in low-income economies than in high-income economies. This finding is clearly not due to market size differences, and only partially explained by slightly higher fundamentals correlation in low-income economies. However, measures of a country's institutionalized...

Statistics on the size and growth of the U.S. federal government, along with the rhetoric of President Franklin Roosevelt, seem to indicate that the Great Depression was the event that started the dramatic growth in government spending and intervention in the private sector that has continued to...

During the past 200 years, most countries have entered a period of modern economic growth-consistent increases in output, input, and productivity per worker that were rare in previous centuries. Even so, a few regions of the world have experienced stagnant or falling living standards in recent...

For centuries, economists have struggled to explain why people and businesses gather in cities.

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

This essay explores the role of the state in promoting exports and industrialization in the quest for transformation of African economies. It does this by exploring the role of trade in African economies followed by a brief look at the East Asian Developmental state. This is followed by an...

The paper discusses some evidence, based on a review of new literature on economic history, about what is referred to as the Sen-hypothesis, that increasing human agency (of both men and women) is a key factor in economic development. It briefly discusses various dimensions of agency (or its...