On the basis of a large (new) dataset of cities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in the millennium between 800 and 1800, we try to provide an answer to the question why, during this millennium, the urban center of gravity moved from Iraq (or more generally the Arab world) to Western...

This article analyses the long-term development of the skill premium in western Europe in a global perspective, on the basis of data on wages of skilled and unskilled construction workers in more than a dozen European countries and regions, and in a number of non-European countries such as...

Can the development of the world economy – the growth of global gross domestic product and the increase in global inequality – in the period from 1820 to 2003 be understood as the result of the spread of one fundamental ‘innovation’, the Industrial Revolution? This...

This paper contributes to the growing literature on the links between political regimes and economic development by studying the effects of years in office on economic development. The hypothesis is that dictators who stay in office for a long time period will become increasingly corrupt, and...

This article tests recent ideas about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe on the basis of a detailed comparison of structure and level of GDP in part of the Yangzi delta and the Netherlands in the 1820s. We find that Dutch GDP per capita was almost twice as high as...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living,...</p>