This paper extends our previous work on grain market integration across Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dobado, García-Hiernaux and Guerrero, 2012). By using the same econometric methodology, we now present: 1) a search for statistical evidence in the East of...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and...

The author argues that although the collapse of the Doha “Development” Round in early summer of 2006 was triggered by the refusal of the United States to agree to the reduction of the ceiling on the amount of domestic subsidies paid to the US farmers, there were some fundamental reasons...

This article is in the first place an attempt to provide evidence of specialization on the basis of a number of Dutch maritime shipping sources. Related topics such as employment, the question of demand and supply, the characteristics of good streams or the everlasting “homeport of the ship or...

Like many countries, Spain has gone through a series of financial crises, both before and after its industrialization. There are many underlying causes for these crises, as well as for the current Spanish downturn. It is worth noting that there are similarities between recessions throughout the...

‘Eurasia’ seems to be a relatively clear concept in terms of physical geography, but much less so for social sciences. While the word ‘Eurasia’ is constantly used in various contexts (more today than twenty years ago), the specific notion of what it actually means is unclear. According...

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scienti�c theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behav- ioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

I argue that a form of consciousness may be found in American economic history, one which is both mathematically demonstrable and important. In this book I present a model of economic and political growth based upon systematic addition. We begin with a philosophic model of trade (pp. 34-46);...

‘Constitutions and Commitments” has inspired the economic literature on the importance of “Legal origins” (LaPorta et al., 1998, 2008), which vindicates the notion that post-Glorious Revolution English institutions were particularly conducive to economic growth. More recently economists...

As one of the world’s most unequal societies, Brazil is often referred to as a land of contrasts: the causes of its high levels of income inequality continuously debated. When solutions are discussed, one of the more frequently recited policy prescriptions is to expand the supply of education...