"In From Old Regime to Industrial State, Richard H. Tilly and Michael Kopsidis question established thinking about Germany's industrialization. They begin their assessment earlier than previous studies have, reaching back to the 18th century to explore the circumstances that ultimately allowed...

Still in recent research a low productive peasant economy and traditional peasant society are often made responsible for Southeast Europe's economic backwardness prior to 1945. However, the radical change of paradigm after 1960 in the view of peasants as agents of economic growth and of their...

With the break-down of the socialist regime in East Germany in 1989/90 the collective farms had to be transformed or to be dissolved. At that time, it had been anticipated by (mostly West German) politicians and agricultural economists alike that collective farms would soon wither away and be...

Our purpose here is to challenge the big-bang approach to economic history in which some alleged institutional imposition - a deus machine - is claimed to launch a series of new economic behaviors. This so-called prime mover is then carried forward by the inexorable forces of path dependency to...

Even after more then ten years after the beginning of the transition process, Russian agriculture shows only limited sign of a recovery. Production has not reached the level of the pre-transition period and investment is still on a very low level. In this paper we use the "Theory of Induced...

This paper explores the pattern of agricultural productivity across 19th century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the ÒLittle DivergenceÓ between European regions. We argue that access to urban demand was the dominant factor explaining the gradient of agricultural productivity as...

The rise of a western-style middle class in many successful emerging economies like China currently is inducing deep structural changes on agricultural world markets and within the global agri-food business. As a result of both higher incomes and concerns over product safety and quality the...