1 Introduction -- 2 An Overview of Pandemics -- 3 The Spanish Flu in the News -- 4 Unequal Mortality during the Spanish Flu -- 5 The Spanish Flu and the Labor Market -- 6 The Spanish Flu and the Housing Market -- 7 Taking Stock: The Aggregate Effects of the Spanish Flu.

Introduction -- Regional economic development in Europe, 1900-2010 : a description of the patterns -- Country chapte -- Austria -- Belgium -- Denmark -- Finland -- France -- Germany -- Italy -- Netherlands -- Norway -- Portugal -- Spain -- Swden -- Switzerland -- United Kingdom and Ireland --...

Comparisons of economic performance over space and time largely depend on how statistical evidence from national accounts and historical estimates are spliced. To allow for changes in relative prices, GDP benchmark years in national accounts are periodically replaced with new and more recent...

How has Latin America's wellbeing evolved over time? How does Latin America compare to today's developed countries (OECD, for short)? What explains their differences? These questions are addressed using an historical index of human development. A sustained improvement in wellbeing can be...

Two distinctive regimes are distinguished in Spain over half-a-millennium. A first one (1270s-1590s) corresponds to a high land-labour ratio frontier economy, pastoral, trade-oriented, and led by towns. Wages and food consumption were relatively high. Sustained per capita growth occurred from...

Long-run trends in Africa’s well-being are provided on the basis of a new index of human development, alternative to the UNDP’s HDI. A sustained improvement in African human development is found that falls, nonetheless, short of those experienced in other developing regions. Within Africa,...

La determinación del momento en el que Argentina comenzó a separarse de la senda seguida por otros países desarrollados constituye uno de los asuntos más controvertidos en la historiografía argentina. La delimitación de las causas que explican su evolución relativa se erige como otro de...

This paper presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for nowadays developed countries -(pre-1994) OECD, for short-. Economic liberty expanded over the last one-and-a-half centuries, reaching two thirds of its maximum possible. Its evolution...

Long-run trends in Africa's wellbeing are provided on the basis of a new index of human development, alternative to the UNDP's HDI. A long-run improvement in African human development is found that it falls short of those experienced in other developing regions. A closer look at Africa reveals...

How has wellbeing evolved over time and across regions? How does the West compare to the Rest? What explains their differences? These questions are addressed using an historical index of human development. A sustained improvement in wellbeing has taken place since 1870. The absolute gap between...