Public-private partnerships (PPPs) hold great promise for improving public services for the poor in emerging markets. But charting the political waters, balancing the needs of governments, consumers, investors, and lenders, and making the transaction transparent and sustainable are challenging...

We introduce a new dataset on British exports at the bilateral, commodity-level from 1700 to 1899. We then pit two primary determinants of bilateral trade against one another: the trade-diminishing effects of distance versus the trade-enhancing effects of the British Empire. We find that the...