Research on the economic roots of democracy tends to focus on income, inequality, education, and/or urbanization. I hypothesize that industrialization — defined as a large share of employment in manufacturing — is more important for democracy. Using novel manufacturing employment data for...

This article explores religion’s contribution to the cultural capital of the modern market economy. Networks of Church and State that originated in premodern times played an important role as conduits for the transmission of cultural values that have endured into the present and set the...

Networks of Church and State that originated in premodern times played an important role as conduits for the transmission of cultural values that have endured into the present and set the economic history of China apart from that of Europe. The imprints of those networks, which preceded the...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

Three decades of Turkish experience with nonselective industrial policies (consistent with neoliberal policy) clearly demonstrates that structural transformation in Turkish economy could not be achieved. In this paper, we have three motivations. Our first motivation is to discuss overall...

Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

Although cross section relationships are often taken to indicate causation, and especially the important impact of economic growth on many social phenomena, they may, in fact, merely reflect historical experience, that is, similar leader-follower country patterns for variables that are causally...

Economists often identify a reduction in the share of agricultural employment as a quantitative indication of the economic growth of nations. But this process did not occur in earnest in the People's Republic of China until the 1980s and to some extent in Japan until well into the mid-20th...

What became the post-War era's "less developed countries" (LDCs) varied enormously in their pre- modern or pre-industrial economic conditions. We hypothesize that if these countries are arrayed on a continuum of pre-industrial development such as that of the demographer Ester Boserup, countries...

African countries are facing great opportunities but also formidable challenges in accelerating economic growth and sustaining a high level of economic performance. The experiences of East Asian countries may offer valuable insights for African leaders and governments in making concerted efforts...