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...

The pessimistic flavour of the Human Development Reports appears to be in contradiction with their own numbers as developing countries fare comparatively better in human development than in per capita GDP terms. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a new, ‘improved’ human...

The aim of the article is to verify a hypothesis on the occurrence of spatial interactions in foreign migrations in selected European cities by applying different spatial weights matrices that define the multidimensional spatial dependences. The analysis used GIS, ESDA, geostatistical, spatial...

The authors suggest a new method to determinate the limits of the three basic income groups. The Lorenz curve is split of three parts. The middle part corresponds to the middle stratum of incomes. The projections of this part on both axes are equal segments. The empirical Lorenz curve is...

What were income trends before the Industrial Revolution? Clark (2007b) argued both theoretically and empirically that pre-industrial income fluctuated, but was not trending upwards, a position Persson (2008) labeled “the Malthus Delusion.” Clark (2010a), in particular, estimated that...

In this paper, we empirically examine the effects of health, education, and urbanization on the total factor productivity (TFP) of a large number of countries. We find that both urbanization and health indicators (life expectancy, infant mortality rate, and the risk of malaria) significantly...

A number of writers have recently questioned whether labour productivity or per capita incomes were ever higher in the United Kingdom than in the United States. We show that although the United States already had a substantial labour productivity lead in industry as early as 1840, especially in...

The idea of manifest real-wage convergence for unskilled workers in the latter half of the nineteenth century stems from an article from 1995 by Jeffrey G. Williamson. That article presented real wage comparisons of unskilled urban workers for seventeen countries. Sweden, along with the rest of...

Although Japanese economic growth after the Meiji Restoration is often characterised as a gradual process of trend acceleration, comparison with the United States suggests that catching-up only really started after 1950, due to the unusually dynamic performance of the US economy before 1950. A...