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This paper tests Jared Diamond's influential theory that an earlier transition from a hunter-gatherer society to agricultural production induces higher levels of technology adoption. Using a proxy for the geographic diffusion barriers of Neolithic technology and an index of biogeographic endowments to isolate the exogenous component of the timing of agricultural transition, the findings indicate that countries that experienced earlier transitions to agriculture were subsequently more capable of adopting new technologies in 1000 BC, 1 AD, and 1500 AD. These results lend strong support to Diamond's hypothesis. ( JEL O30, O40) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late Victorian Britain was very important in the development of British dominance in light consumer goods industries, such as fermented liquors and spirits; detergents and perfumery; bicycles and other carriages; paper, stationery, and bookbinding; and games of all kinds and sports goods. Firms developed technology-based innovations and marketing-based innovations, creating abnormal peaks of trademark registrations in certain industries. This article investigates those peaks and shows that factors usually pointed out as explaining British economic decline in heavy industries did not impact on the development of light consumer goods industries, and on the contrary encouraged their fast growth during this period. Trademark registrations are shown to provide new insights into the debate on British relative decline, when combined with other industry and firm-level data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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If land is titled and transferable, it can be used as collateral against which money can be borrowed. The resulting increase in access to credit is usually expected to foster economic growth. This article focuses on a policy in colonial India that made land less available as collateral for debt. Using a panel dataset for Punjab districts from 1890 to 1910, the findings show that this reduced the availability of mortgage‐backed credit, but did not hurt proxies for economic development, such as acreage and cattle, at least in the short run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Clark's claims about the scale of English agricultural output from the 1200s to the 1860s flout historical and geographical reality. His income‐based estimates start with the daily real wages of adult males and assume that days worked per year were constant. Those advanced in British economic growth make no such assumption and instead are built up from the output side. They correlate better with population trends and are consistent with an economy slowly growing and becoming richer. Clark's denial that such growth occurred, his assertion that substantially more land must have been under arable cultivation, his belief that conditions of full employment invariably prevailed in the countryside at harvest time, his concern that the wage bill would have exceeded the value of output in British economic growth, his refusal to consider the possibility that the working year was of variable length, and his assertion that output per acre must have been equalized across arable and pasture are all shown to be figments of his ‘Malthus delusion’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the causes of the great divergence by comparing the use of expensive labour‐saving capital goods—water‐mills, windmills, and cranes—in medieval western Europe and the Middle East. Using novel ways of measuring, we find that whereas the use of these goods increased in Europe, in the Middle East their prevalence decreased, or they were not used at all. We investigate several possible explanations and reject most of them, including religion, geography, technological knowledge, and disparities in wages and cost of capital. Our analysis shows that differences in lordship systems and the security of property rights best explain the patterns found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses price information relating to 12 towns and wage information from 18 towns to develop a real wage index for unskilled urban labourers in Germany during the three-and-a-half centuries preceding the onset of rapid industrialization. Combining the new series with information from other parts of Europe establishes two stages of real wage divergence during the seventeenth to nineteenth century. The first occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century when real wages in centres of trade and finance located on the rim of the North Sea rose far above the level prevailing in their hinterland. The second stage unfolded from the second quarter of the eighteenth century when the real wage in south England, northern and central Italy, and Germany began to diverge; Germany followed a middle path between the other two countries. The second commercial revolution, which improved business techniques and promoted Smithian growth, goes a long way towards accounting for this development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a large database from the register of inhabitants of Madrid, this article confirms that the literacy levels of internal migrants moving to the Spanish capital city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were higher than that of those who remained in their provinces of origin. This article also explores the different factors influencing the nature and intensity of the selection process. The empirical exercise stresses that the stock of previous migration was a fundamental factor in allowing less literate individuals to join the migration process as well. Interestingly, distance to Madrid hardly affected the profile of male migrants, but it was a strong influence on female migration, although its importance diminished over time. Lastly, the results presented here show that other internal destinations were attracting different types of migrants, often resulting in negative self-selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Was there an agro-ecological crisis in Europe which preceded and contributed to pushing forward the agricultural revolution? This article presents a new theoretical and empirical approach to this controversial perspective on agricultural transformation and relates to an ongoing debate on conditions of growth in pre-industrial societies. The results demonstrate that there were indeed indicators of a crisis, which grew stronger during the eighteenth century and culminated in the early nineteenth century. The crisis was, however, not general, but was rather restricted to areas that stand out due to poor natural conditions for agriculture. In other words, the crisis was conditional. Furthermore, the findings show that the crisis could push forward changes that were important for enabling agricultural transformation and growth. However, both the emergence and reversal of the crisis were connected to new opportunities opened up by market development. Enough differences were found between different types of regions to suggest that there were many development paths within the agricultural transformation process, and that they were not necessarily linear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the relative growth performance of centrally planned economies in the broader context of postwar growth in Europe. It reports a new dataset of revised estimates for investment rates in eastern European countries between 1950 and 1989. Complemented with data on other growth determinants, this evidence is used to re-evaluate the socialist growth record in a conditional convergence framework with a panel of 24 European countries. After controlling for relative backwardness, investment rates, and improvements in human capital, the findings show that centrally planned economies underperformed due to their relative inefficiency only after the postwar golden age. In the 1950s and 1960s, eastern Europe was falling behind mainly due to relatively low levels of investment and weak reconstruction dynamics. Both are explained, in part, by the lack of labour-supply flexibility that, in turn, resulted from the comparatively much larger negative impact of the war on population growth in eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wine cooperatives were relatively scarce in Europe before the Second World War, but by the 1980s accounted for more than half of all wines made in France, Italy, and Spain, the three major producer countries. Unlike Danish dairy cooperatives, whose success before the First World War was linked to their ability to improve product quality and compete in high-value niche markets, wine cooperatives are often associated with the production of large volumes of low-quality products. This article argues that the initial slow diffusion of wine cooperatives was caused by the difficulties of improving quality due to environmental conditions in European vineyards ('terroir') and measurement problems, rather than institutional shortcomings. Cooperatives only became widespread when the state found them a useful instrument to regulate markets, especially after 1950. The problems associated with poor wine quality were never resolved, and cooperatives have become increasingly uncompetitive in the market place, especially following the major decline in per capita consumption and shift towards premium wines from the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the possibility that the trans-Atlantic slave trade influenced the political institutions of villages and towns in precolonial Africa. Using anthropological data, it shows that villages and towns of ethnic groups with higher slave exports were more politically fragmented during the precolonial era. Instrumental variables are used to show that the relationship is causal. It is argued that this fragmentation is important for relative economic development because it still influences political institutions today. This argument is supported by the use of more contemporary data to show that in contemporary Nigeria and Tanzania, areas with higher levels of precolonial political fragmentation have a higher incidence of bribery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for the developed countries of today, specifically pre-1994 OECD members. Economic liberty expanded over the last century-and-a-half, reaching more than two-thirds of its possible maximum. However, its evolution has been far from linear. After a substantial improvement from the mid-nineteenth century, the First World War brought a major setback. The postwar recovery up to 1929 was followed by a dramatic decline in the 1930s. Significant progress took place during the 1950s but fell short of the pre- First World War peak. After a period of stagnation, steady expansion since the early 1980s has resulted in the highest levels of economic liberty of the last two centuries. Each of the main dimensions of economic freedom exhibited a distinctive trend and its contribution to the aggregate index varied over time. Overall, improved property rights provided the main contribution to the long-run advancement of economic liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Railways were one of the main engines of the Latin American trade boom before 1914. Railway construction often required financial support from local governments, which depended on their fiscal capacity. However, since the main government revenues were trade-related, this generated a two-way feedback between government revenues and railways, with a potential for multiple equilibria. The empirical tests in this article support the hypothesis of such a positive two-way relationship. The main implication of our analysis is that the build-up of state capacity was a necessary condition for railway expansion and also, to a large extent, for export expansion in Latin America during the first globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do new school types focusing on practical and business-related knowledge lead to increased economic performance? To analyse this question, this article examines the introduction of two types of modern secondary education, the Gewerbeschule and its successor, the Realschule, in nineteenth-century Bavaria. Since the opening of these schools is arguably endogenous-as it was mainly the large, prosperous cities that opened one-the estimated treatment effect capturing the economic influence of the Gewerbeschule/ Realschule will lead to biased results. To alleviate this bias, propensity score matching is adopted to compare relatively similar counties with and without these schools. Using historical county-level data on tax revenues, business formations, employment structure, and patent holdings, ordinary least squares regression analysis shows that the opening of a modern secondary school is in general positively associated with economic performance several years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard theoretical models predict that higher inflation expectations generate greater current consumer spending at the zero lower bound of interest rates. However, recent empirical studies using U.S. micro data find negative results for this relationship. We use micro data for Japan, which has experienced low interest rates for a prolonged period, to estimate ordered probit models with a variety of controls. We find robust evidence supporting the prediction of standard models: survey respondents with higher expected inflation tend to indicate that their household has increased real spending compared with 1 year ago but will decrease it in the future. This relationship appears to be stronger for asset holders and older people. ( JEL E20, E21, E30, E31, E50, E52) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of cocoa-farming in Ghana, this article takes up the longrunning but recently neglected debate about the 'cash crop revolution' in tropical Africa during the early colonial period. It focuses on the supply side, to test the much criticized but never superseded 'vent-for-surplus' interpretation of the export expansion as a substitution of labour for leisure. The article argues that while the model captured certain features of the case, such as the application of labour to underused land, its defining claim about labour is without empirical foundation. Rather, the evidence points to a reallocation of resources from existing market activities towards the adoption of an exotic crop, entailing a shift towards a new, qualitatively different and more profitable kind of production function. This innovation is best understood in the context of the long-term search of African producers for ways of realizing the economic potential of their resource of relatively abundant land, while ameliorating the constraints which the environment put upon its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of culture in encouraging the diffusion of cooperation for the production and marketing of agricultural products, an organizational innovation that can be related to technical progress in the rural sector and higher living standards for farmers. The results of the zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) pooled regressions show that trust and religion were significant determinants of the diffusion of cooperatives among farmers in western countries. Results of the logit portion of these regressions suggest that the density of production was positively related to cooperation and that cooperation decreased where higher inequality in land distribution predominated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses newspaper advertisements to chart the changes in speeds and fares of stage coaches, identifying the main periods of increasing speeds among London coaches as the 1760s-80s and 1810s-20s, separated by a period when speeds declined. It then measures productivity growth. Fares of London coaches in 1835-6 were about 27 per cent of what they would have been but for improvements in horses, vehicles, and roads from 1750, and the two main periods of productivity growth correspond to those of rising speeds. Speeds and productivity of regional coaches increased more smoothly. The rising productivity firmly identifies road transport as one of the modernizing sectors of the economy. New figures are put forward for the growing number of London and regional coaches, indicating rapid growth in passenger miles. While turnpike trusts had little impact before the 1750s, their increasing effectiveness, together with the use of steel springs and improved horses, was crucial to the rising productivity of the 1760s-80s, and even more so to that of the 1810s-20s. The cross roads were apparently poorer than London roads in the late eighteenth century, but thereafter the gap narrowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth and change in eighteenth-century Britain, both the expansion of pre-industrial commercial society and the industrial revolution itself, have been explored using a variety of approaches. This article highlights a relatively ignored aspect of the problem, arguing that the state, politics, and political economic ideology played a central role. In particular, the early eighteenth-century political victory of a version of political economy associated with the Whig party, which centred on manufacturing and consumption, was a prerequisite for the economic developments later in the century. The article begins by describing a political economy of manufacturing and its rival, a political economy of re-exporting associated with the Tory party. It then explains how and why a political economy of manufacturing became dominant, examining both political elites and ordinary voters and petitioners. The growth of manufacturing and consumption must be understood, therefore, as political as much as economic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imposition of the world's first modern income tax in 1799 prompted a revival of interest in national accounting. This article examines the extent to which William Pitt the Younger, who proposed the new tax, modelled his estimates of national wealth on those produced a century earlier by the pioneers in this field, Sir William Petty, Charles Davenant, and Gregory King. In addition, the calculations of Benjamin Bell and Henry Beeke, two of Pitt's contemporaries, are analysed in detail to highlight the fragility of these contemporary estimates of national income. This analysis has important implications for economic historians who have used this material to try to establish the structure and growth of national output. National accountants during the long eighteenth century were not, for the most part, concerned with structural change. Rather, their descriptions of economic structure should be understood as reflecting a particular set of a priori claims about what they deemed to be the proper mode and distribution of taxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the composition and geographies of individual wealth holding in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century. It draws on various forms of death duty records to determine the individual ownership of wealth including both personal property and real estate. By combining information on these different kinds of property, it is possible to explore how different strata of wealth holders accumulated specific forms of wealth at the time of their death. The article then examines how the composition of that wealth varied according to the wealth holder's location in the urban hierarchy and distance from London. It points out important geographical differences in both the scale and nature of wealth holding and raises questions about the implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Federalist financial revolution' may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that free banks had little or no effect on growth. The result is not just a symptom of the era, as state-chartered banks seem to have strong and positive effects on manufacturing and urbanization. ( JEL G21, N21, O43) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past one of the main challenges to households was that of coping with adversity. War, plague, famine, and flood were a constant threat, and could reduce what little improvements families had made in productivity. Economic growth therefore required a means of absorbing external adversities. To see how well late medieval households coped with adversity, this investigation focuses on the households of a small town and its surroundings in early modern Holland. Our findings reveal that several severe external shocks around 1500 had little effect on the general level or distribution of wealth, which suggests that certain forms of insurance may have protected the population. The results show that households increasingly invested in capital markets rather than employing such techniques as scattered holdings and hoarding. This fact indicates that such investment played a vital role in a household's risk aversion strategy. The change from unproductive to more productive risk-aversion strategies also provides some clues about progress with respect to insurance during Holland's financial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effects of political structure on rulers' monopolistic gains and investment decisions in the context of the medieval milling industry in northern France, 1150–1250. Using Salop's spatial model, this article aims to show that political fragmentation increased investment in watermill construction because it reduced the capacity of rulers to limit competition from neighbouring mills. The calculations demonstrate that competition significantly reduced rulers' income from watermills and that the construction of more than 50 per cent of these mills cannot be economically ‘justified’ unless rulers' profit maximization over joint production is considered, and revenues from additional labour allocated to wheat production is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrialization of shoemaking occurred in small towns in antebellum New England in which capital formation was severely hampered by currency and credit problems prior to the Legal Tender Act of 1862. In a comparison of two communities, it was discovered that the construction of a railroad had different results depending on the structural ties between the community and the railroad. In one community, the railroad drew external capital to the community that provided the basis for a crucial expansion of scale of shoe production prior to the rise of the factory system. In the other, it depleted local capital, ending the shoe industry and damaging most other local economic activities as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]