Why did the country that borrowed the most industrialize first? Earlier research has viewed the explosion of debt in 18th century Britain as either detrimental, or as neutral for economic growth. In this paper, we argue instead that Britain's borrowing boom was beneficial. The massive issuance...

The paper presents a decomposition of productivity gap between South-Korea and Estonia for the year 2006. After presenting stylised facts related to income conver-gence, we apply shift-share analysis to explain the patterns of structural disparities both at aggregated sectoral level and within...