A long-term assessment of Asia's share of global GDP suggests that Asia has now almost reclaimed the role in the global economy it occupied in 1820. By focusing on the experience of key economies in Asia, this paper assesses why the continent's role weakened between 1820 and 1950 and...

This paper explores the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over the both the short and very long run. Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting poor countries between 1865 and 2007. A single equation error correction model...

This paper offers some preliminary insights into the impact of a particular type of credit instrument, the lien, on the distribution of de facto and de jure political power in the postbellum US South and the Australian colony of New South Wales. De facto political power arises when wealth...

I exploit the sudden increase in employment in 1975, 1976 and 1977 in some former homelands by comparing the long term adult physical outcomes of children benefitting from the employment increase to those not subject to it. Using a standard difference in difference approach I find that there was...

Macro-economic measurement goes back to the 17th century and became common practice in Western countries since the late-19th century. Since then, the growth and composition of some of the largest economies in Asia, particularly India and Japan, was also probed. And since the 1940s government...

The dramatic expansion of public and private financial markets in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution has received extensive attention. Despite interest in the operation of the capital market, much less is known about how ordinary individual investors managed risk within this framework....

This paper reports the first long-run test of how Genuine Savings (also called comprehensive investment or adjusted net savings) predicts future well-being. The theory of weak sustainability suggests that a country with a positive level of Genuine Savings (GS) should experience non-declining...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

This paper undertakes an investigation of the process of decline and rebirth of textile manufacturing in two Middle Eastern regions, Egypt and western Anatolia during the first wave of globalisation (1850-1914). Through the application of the “Dutch Disease” model we explore the linkages...