Studies comparing regional income in Japan before and after World War II have frequently drawn a picture of radical change from an economy characterized by large regional disparities to one characterized by small regional disparities. This paper comes to a very different conclusion. Based on...

Current discussions of climate change are overly focused on the science underpinning environmental impact, with little attention to socioeconomic consequences. The economics of environmental change in particular is insufficiently informed by the lessons that past experiences can yield. Drawing...

Wheat production stagnated in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while cultivated acreage and wheat output declined sharply around the Mediterranean from the 1870s. Wheat output never recovered in this region despite the introduction in 1885 of tariff measures, such...

The paper develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth and compare them with leading cities in Europe, Japan and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the...

Did economic development result in an improvement in biological welfare in the tropics before the diffusion of modern public health techniques in the 1950s and 1960s? Between the mid-19th and early 20th century, Lower Burma experienced a rapid rise in population and became increasingly...

It is generally accepted that agriculture played a crucial role in Japanese economic development during the Meiji period (1868-1912). According to the Long-Term Economic Statistics of Japan estimates, per capita food consumption grew by 1.1% annually in constant yen between 1874 and 1912....