The Paper draws its motivation from the observation that, three years into the single currency, EMU financial markets are making only slow progress towards integration and from the belief that economic history can offer useful insights as to the causes of the phenomenon. In this vein, we...

We argue against the use of composite indices, such as the Human Development Index (HDI), in economic history. We show that the HDI can be interpreted as a formal representation of the analyst’s ethical system. We support our claim by introducing a new class of paternalistic social welfare...