This paper empirically assesses Saudi Arabia’s industrial policy using data on policy announcements matched to industry-level exports and firm-level outcomes. It first provides a comprehensive overview of the country’s industrial policy landscape, documenting the scale, timing, sectoral...

The Hard Steps model is applied to argue that the Industrial Revolution (IR) heralded a terminal phase of human existence. Assuming six hard steps, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov method is used to pinpoint the start of the IR to ≈ year 1700. Once these hard steps were cleared, the global economy...

According to the Italian philosopher Tilgher (1922), the birth of the bourgeois society during the Pre-Industrial era involved the replacement of the Ancient Man by the Modern Man, and consisted of a reorienta- tion of efforts from spiritual exercises developing the inner self (what Marcus...

This research examines the impact of industrial agglomeration on the productivity of SMEs in Vietnam, using FE regression for panel data and the PSM method. The study utilizes data from the General Statistics Office of Vietnam (2016-2020) and the OECD's TiVA database. The findings highlight the...

While the influence of neighborhoods on later life outcomes is well documented, the historical processes that shaped the growth and social makeup of urban areas are less understood. We address this by analyzing newly compiled geocoded data covering the entire population of Stockholm from 1878 to...

Significant discrepancies in electricity pricing are observed across countries, particularly between industrial and household rates. Although the literature studies the relationship between electricity prices and economic performance, little empirical evidence exists on how electricity price...

Currently, achieving sustainable transformation toward a carbon-dioxide-free industrial production process is one of the greatest challenges. The chemical element hydrogen used as an energy source and a basic feedstock can play an important role in reaching this goal. Our analysis is based on...

This paper analyzes the use of tax policy as industrial policy in Mozambique. Despite significant foregone tax revenue due to industrial policy in the form of tax incentives, the effectiveness of Mozambique's tax policy remains questionable due to insufficient data and unclear public policy...

Hydrogen serves as an energy source and represents an important cornerstone for achieving the goal of maintaining a level of zero-carbon-dioxide emissions in industry production processes. Our analysis is based on the computable general equilibrium framework and focuses on a partial switch to...

Bartels, Jäger and Obergruber (2024) examine how division rules for the inheritance of agricultural land affected distributional outcomes in 19th century and contemporary Germany. The authors use a regression discontinuity design to show that equal-division counties-those in which inheritance...

Massive and irrational exploitation of natural resources promoted the industrialization process, which formed different categories of resource-based cities. Although these cities have made dramatic contributions to socio-economic development in the last two decades, they are now facing grave...

The digital economy is a key driver of industrial upgrading and regional growth. Focusing on Gansu Province-an under-represented, less-developed region in northwest China-this study constructs a multidimensional digital economy index (DEI) for 2009-2023 under a unified normalisation and...

Creativity and innovation are now being encouraged in businesses because of technopreneurship, especially as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0) picks up. In addition, the evolution brought by technology has influenced our everyday lives, jobs and communication, making it easier for...

Empirical evidence on the historical role of Compulsory Schooling Laws (CSL) for the spread of mass education is mixed at best. This is also due to the difficulty of identifying exogenous variation in the application of CSL. We exploit an almost unique feature of a CSL in 1877 Italy which was...

This paper is an institutional study of the patent systems of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and its successor states Belgium and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. The patent law of 1817 gave the state wide discretion to accept or refuse patents and to customise their duration,...

This article proposes to take a fresh look at Germany’s colonial past and its key players in order to trace the particular influence of economy in colonial contexts. It presents the Gutehoffnungshütte (GHH) as a colonial actor outside the sectors typically explored in the context of the...

Clean industrialisation is a political and economic priority for the European Union. For it to work, affordable clean energy is needed. However, producing this energy in Europe is constrained by limited renewable energy endowments (sunshine and wind) and land availability, while the...

Why did the industrial revolution occur in Europe and not in China, despite China being well ahead of Europe in terms of economic and technological achievements several centuries earlier? We revisit this long-standing question from a new perspective. We emphasize the importance of the different...

The rise of China in the global economy has been linked with negative impacts on employment across many high- and middle-income countries. However, evidence for African countries is limited. This paper investigates the causal relationship between Chinese imports and manufacturing employment in...