In today's mixed-model assembly production, there are two recent trendsin particular, namely increasing vertical integration and the proliferation ofproduct variety, which more and more shift focus to an ecient just-in-timepart supply. In this context, many automobile manufacturers set up...

Although industrial production and growth in Greece during the interwar periodhas attracted considerable attention, there has not been any serious challengeeither in qualitative or quantitative terms to the orthodoxy established in theperiod itself. The literature usually sees the 1920s as a...

It is not easy to write the ‘long-term’ economic history of any region in India -- which may account for the fact that very few such histories have been written. One obvious problem concerns the availability of data: where a paucity of sources for the pre-colonial period suddenly becomes...

By the late 19th century, the export of natural ice from Norway to Britain was a major trade, fuelled by the growing British consumption of ice. Although new technology eventually allowed the production of artificial ice, natural ice retained a strong market position until World War I. This...

“Migrations have been part of human history since the dawn of time”. Yet, in the wake of long-term economic transformations over the past five hundred years, human migration and mobility have assumed a dimension which has proved new both in scale and in character. The gradual transformation...

Manufacturers in a wide range of industries nowadays face the challenge of providing arich product variety at very low cost. This typically requires the implementation of costefficient, flexible production systems. Often, so called mixed-model assembly lines areemployed, where setup operations...

The period of 1840 (when the Opium War broken out) till now is commonly regarded as China’s modern era, ‘modern’ in terms of China’s departure from its original growth and developmental path. In this context, the term modern has been intimately associated with something alien to the...

In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge oneelement has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of aGross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity.This paper suggests approaching the history of developmentthinking by travelling with the GDP through this...

In everyday scientific practice, facts come in two sizes: smallfacts (data acquired by researchers through experimentation orfield work), and big facts (claims about phenomena for whichdata function as evidence). This paper explores the processesthrough which small and big facts are circulated...

Changes in information and communication technologieshave increased the offshorability of tasks.As routine tasks (Pol Antràs, Luis Garicano and EstebanRossi-Hansberg, 2006) and lower offshoring-costtasks (Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg,2008) move abroad, production processes become...