This article mobilizes and integrates both existing and new time series data on real wages, physical heights and age-heaping to examine the long-term trend of living standards and human capital for China during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Our findings confirm the existence of a...

The 19th century was a period of great transformations for Italy. Political unification was achieved in 1861 while economic unification was still far off. Ever since, Italian industrialization has been unbalanced, as the pre-existing gap between Northern and Southern economic development has...

This paper confirms the conclusion of the social savings methodology that industrial development was not dependent on the railways. However, it finds that there would have been a significant change in the distribution of industry without rail, a point underestimated by the social savings...