The Dutch 16th and 17th centuries were a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. Since the Dutch economy was and is very small, an important source of growth was bound to be international trade. In this paper we argue that the contributions of entrepreneurship to innovation transcend the...

On the basis of a newly constructed dataset of the national accounts of the province of Holland in the period between 1347 and 1800, we analyze the pattern of growth in this region, which was one of the most prosperous and dynamic parts of the pre modern European economy. We demonstrate that...

A new dataset for estimating the development of global inequality between 1820 and 2000 is presented, based on a large variety of sources and methods for estimating (gross household) income inequality. On this basis, and two sets of benchmarks for estimating between-country inequality (the...

This paper presents new estimates of the development of the urban population andthe urbanization ratio for the period spanning the Song and late Qing dynasties. Urbanizationis viewed, as in much of the economic historical literature on the topic, as an indirectindicator of economic development...