This paper considers the sources of long-term economic growth for Turkey over the period 1880-2005. The period in question covers the decline and eventual dissolution of the former Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the new Turkish Republic in 1923. Hence, the paper provides a unique look at...

The joint increase in the number and size of patents filed around the world puts patent systems under pressure. This paper addresses issues in measuring the voluminosity of patent applications and highlights patterns in its evolution. The results - based on a 2 million EPO applications database...

The joint increase in the number and size of patents filed around the world puts the patent system under pressure. This paper analyses the sources of this surge in number of claims and pages of patent applications at the EPO. Four hypotheses are scrutinized: the diffusion of national drafting...

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...

Despite the importance attributed to the e¤ects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations, the origins of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries have been underexplored. Building on the role of deeply-rooted biogeographical forces in...

Over the last millennium, the clan and the city have been the locus of cooperation in China and Europe respectively. This paper examines - analytically, historically, and empirically - the cultural, social, and institutional co-evolution that led to this bifurcation. We highlight that groups...

This paper focuses on developing countries that export for the first time to the OECD and obtains several important results on export dynamic, linking exports experience and exports survival. Using product level data at the SITC 5 digit level for 114 developing countries on the 1962-2009 period,...

Unlike most cross-country growth analyses, we focus on turning points in growth performance. We look for instances of rapid acceleration in economic growth that are sustained for at least eight years and identify more than 80 such episodes since the 1950s. Growth accelerations tend to be...

Botswana has had the highest rate of per capita growth of any country in the world in the last 35 years. This occurred despite adverse initial conditions, including minimal investment during the colonial period and high inequality. Botswana achieved this rapid development by following orthodox...

Most conventional accounts of India’s recent economic performance associate the pick-up in economic growth with the liberalization of 1991. This Paper demonstrates that the transition to high growth occurred around 1980, a full decade before economic liberalization. We investigate a number of...