Showing 1 - 10 of 366
How did Europe overtake China? We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors, and use it to explain how European per capita incomes and urbanization rates surged ahead of Chinese ones. Productivity growth can only explain a small fraction of rising living standards. Population dynamics...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005792138
This paper provides a documentation of the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for 19th-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816-1901, with much...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083606
World War I. Some, like the three Scandinavian economies, used industrialization to achieve a spectacular convergence on the … leaders, especially in real wages and living standards. Some, like Ireland, achieved convergence without industrialization …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005124320
This paper examines the role of competition in productivity perfromance in Britain over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009024927
This paper argues that an economy's transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth requires markets to reach a critical size, and competition to reach a critical level of intensity. By allowing an economy to produce a greater variety of goods, a larger market makes goods more...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005041097
We document a very large increase in agricultural productivity, peasants’ living standards, and industrial development in the 19th century Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom. We construct a novel province-level panel dataset of development outcomes and conduct a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011165638
The concepts of s-convergence, absolute b-convergence and conditional b-convergence are discussed in this paper. The concepts are applied to a variety of data sets that include a large cross section of 110 countries, the sub-sample of OECD countries, the states within the United States, the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005656407
After arguing that the concepts of b-convergence and s-convergence are independently interesting, this paper extends the empirical evidence on regional growth and convergence across the United States, Japan, and five European nations. We confirm that the estimated speeds of convergence are...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005114384
Italy's economic performance between 1945 and 1992 is assessed in a general theoretical framework for productivity growth measurement which enables us to relax the binding assumptions of standard Solow-type neoclassical models. The paper shows that `true productivity' was of minor importance,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005498056
We examine the growth performance of Sweden in the post-World War II period, focusing on explaining the relative decline of economic growth in Sweden since the early 1970's. The hypothesis that the relative decline is a consequence of productivity catch-up is rejected. A number of potential...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005791604