We explain per-capita income gaps across US states and Canadian provinces by the following chain of causation. Geography determined where Europeans originally settled: in Northeastern USA, along those segments of the Atlantic coast where the climate was neither too hot (the US South), nor too...

Abstract The East Asian countries achieved extraordinarily fast economic growth during the last four decades. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that they represented the most successful case of rapid industrialisation and sustained economic growth in the history of mankind. This paper...