This paper examines the trajectory of economic development in Botswana between the years 1820 and 1966, when it achieved independence. First, I review the historical trends in the country’s economic and social development indicators. I then proceed to analyze what factors have encouraged or...

The debate around the effects of globalization is both widening and deepening. While some nations, like India and China – countries that have consciously built a manufacturing sector for five decades – come across as winners, a large number of smaller Third World nations seem to lose out...

The traditional relationship of patronage and clientship between the landlord- and the growing commercial class in Bida and other Nigerian Emirates - firmly established during the 19th century - left indelible marks which influence the pattern of social communication between these two classes...

This paper deals with institutional persistence in long-term economic development. We investigate the historical record of education in one of the fastest growing and most unequal societies in the twentieth century – the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Based on historical data from an...

Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) represents another breakthrough work in her career, and the second volume in a multi-volume work on the economic and intellectual history of western civilization. In a sense, the subtitle of the book explains well what this volume is all about--why...

This working paper presents analysis about long-term trend in economic growth by examining per-capita GDP in Germany for the years 1870-1989. It supports explanation for economic growth by way of a single, deterministic trend in market-centered economies, when holding non-economic features...

The concept of club convergence has been widely used in empirical analysis to group countries in clubs with similar development paths. However, there is no unified agreement on how to identify the clubs in the first place. In this paper, I argue that economic history can guide us to identify...

New Europe has never had it so good. Its income, quality of life and level of happiness have never been closer to that of the developed countries in Western Europe. With its per capita income at an all-time high and the quality of life almost indistinguishable from developed countries, the...

In this paper we study the state's role in the modernization and urban transformation in Buenos Aires in the period 1850-1910. This transformation was connected with the economic movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a modernizing movement, a radical alteration of the...

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between physical infrastructure and economic development of Pakistan. A composite index of physical infrastructure has been constructed through Principal Component Analysis. This has been done by taking into account three different dimensions of...