The Great Irish Famine, 1846-50, and the Great Ukrainian Famine, 1932-33 are searing episodes in the history of the two countries. On some estimates, the relative intensity of famine in the two societies was broadly the same, with famine conditions claiming the lives of one-in-eight of the...

Economists have long neglected study of an important contractual decision, a firm's choice of legal form. Enterprise form shapes the relations among a firm's owners as well as many features of a firm's interactions with the rest of the economy. Using unusual firm-level data on Spain 1886-1936,...

The Spanish business code allowed firms great flexibility in their organizational form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Until 1920, firms had the same basic choices as in France and some other European countries, namely, the corporation, the ordinary partnership, or the...

Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

The validity of Wagner’s law, which states that the growth of public expenditure can be explained as a result of the increase in economic activity, is tested for Greece during the period 1833-1938. This represents a period of growth, industrialisation and modernisation of the economy,...

The history of the Netherlands reveals major shifts from centralisation of government tasks towards decentralisation and vice versa. In the seventeenth century, the Republic of United Provinces was the first federal state in modern history. Many transformations later the Kingdom of the...

We investigate the connection between privatization in post-communist Russia and a mass privatization reform in Imperial Russia, the 1906 Stolypin land reform. Specifically, we relate historical measures of conflicts associated with the Stolypin reform to contemporary views on whether the...

This paper examines the development and role of the real estate taxation in Sweden during the period between 1862 and 2010. Real estate has historically been taxed at both the local and state levels in Sweden. The importance of real estate taxation in Sweden is nevertheless difficult to assess...

This paper presents annual Swedish time series data regarding consumption taxes, i.e., the indirect taxation of goods and services, for the 1862–2013 period. As a share of total state tax revenue, consumption tax revenue was high at the beginning of the period, although as a share of GDP, it...

Luigi Bodio (1840-1920) was an Italian economist and statistician, considered one of the founders of the Italian Statistics. He was one of the 21 founding members of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1885, ISI Director-General during the first 20 years (1885-1905) and ISI...