A decade has passed since Robert Lucas asked why capital does not flow from rich to poor countries. Lucas used a contemporary example to illustrate his Paradox, the very modest flow of capital from the United States to India during the second great global capital market boom, after 1970. Had he...

Despite an enormous literature that has analyzed the comparative experiences of Latin America and Asia in post-World War II trade policy, almost no attention has been paid to the comparative experience prior to the wars. Even a cursory look at the best available empirical evidence reveals...

This paper uses a new database to establish a key finding: high tariffs were associated with fast growth before World War II, while associated with slow growth thereafter. The paper offers some explanations for the sign switch by controlling for novel measures of the changing world economic...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it’s the Iberian colonists’ fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin...

This paper documents industrial output growth around the poor periphery (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa) between 1870 and 2007. We find that although the roots of rapid peripheral industrialization stretch into the late 19th...

New data now allow conjectures on the levels of real and nominal incomes in the thirteen American colonies. New England was the poorest region, and the South was the richest. Colonial per capita incomes rose only very slowly, and slowly for five reasons: productivity growth was slow; population...

Building what we call social tables, this paper quantifies the level and inequality of American incomes from 1774 to 1860. In 1774 the American colonies had average incomes exceeding those of the Mother Country, even when slave households are included in the aggregate. Between 1774 and 1790,...

This paper augments the new historical literature on factor price convergence. The focus is on the late nineteenth century, when economic convergence among the current OECD countries was dramatic; and the focus is on the convergence between Old World and New, by far the biggest participants in...

As part of a process that has been at work since 1850, real wages among the current OECD countries converged during the late 19th century. The convergence was pronounced as that which we have seen in the post World War Il period. This paper uses computable general equilibrium models to isolate...

India was a major player in the world export market for textiles in the early 18th century, but by the middle of the 19th century it had lost all of its export market and much of its domestic market. India underwent secular deindustrialization as a consequence. While India produced about 25...