Why did the West grow so rapidly over the last 500 years, while much of therest of the world stagnated? And why several countries, especially in East Asia, grown so fast over the last half-century? If we can understand these growth experiences, and identify the forces which made them possible,...

This paper tries to be the first step in a systematic comparison of economic growth in Denmark and Ireland between 1870 and 1939. Section 2 ofthis paper sets the scene by discussing broader trends of living standards and agricultural productivity. Section 3 outlines the developments in the...

This is a paper about intercontinental trade, since factor proportions differ far more between continents than within. Long distance intercontinental trade was also the economic event which motivated the theoretical work of Bertil Ohlin.

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey's excellent The Rise of Free Trade (RFT) gathers together speeches, contemporary writing and extracts from parliamentary debates relating to British trade policy between 1815 and 1906 (the year in which free trade was consolidated by a decisice General Election victory...

A simple look at nominal or effective tariff rates is not sufficient to analyse the trade policy. One has to consider the overall effects of protection, and by definition this requires a general equilibrium approach. The present paper aims to fill this gap in the literature. It makes use of a...

The paper collects the available Irish banking statistics from 1840 to 1921, and uses these to speculate about trends in living standards during the period. In particular, it estimates a velocity function for five countries using annual data from 1876 to 1913. It then uses this function to...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question : Are trade and factor flows substitutes? This paper uses history to fill the gap.

OLS estimates of the rate of return to education are subject to a number of potential biases. Recent developments in the literature have focused particularly on exploiting alternative instruments, arising naturally in the data, to counteract these problems. A number of such instrumens are...

This paper presents a small-open-economy model calibrated to Irish data. The model can be used for many purposes. It is applied here to the EMU debate. I comes close to replicating the employment eeffects of sterling weakness reported in the recent ESRI study.

The issue of how regional labour markets adjust to shocks has received increased attention in the context of EMu, yet relatively little is known about this aspect of the Irish economy. Using the methodology developed by Blanchard and Katz (1992) this paper explores the evolution of employment,...