This paper describes the industrial development of Europe to 1600. The conventional history of industrial development sees technological progress as its primary cause. However, this paper argues that the source of rising productivity was not new technology but the reorganization of production in response to falling trading costs and the expansion of trade. The expansion of trade changed which g...

Significant economic disparities among China’s Eastern, Central, and Western regions pose unequivocal challenges to social equality and political stability in the country. A major impediment to economic development, especially in the poor, remote Western region, is the shortage of transportation infrastructure. The Chinese government has committed to substantial investment for improving the acc...

How does isolation affect the economic activity of cities? Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of intercity transport costs in determining the income of sub-Saharan African cities. In particular, focusing on fifteen countries whose largest city is a po...

This study investigates spatial dependence and mechanisms of regional development in Greater Beijing, China by employing spatial statistical techniques. We have detected positive, strengthening global spatial autocorrelation from 1978 to 2001, and found such strengthening is the result of newly formed/extended clusters in the area. The local analysis recognizes local regimes of two-tier urban-r...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008 and idiosyncratic shocks. Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion of households had to adjust food consumption in response. Regression results indicate that households w...

Technical Change and Total Factor Productivity Growth: The Case of Chinese Provinces In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect technical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely external non-economic) as well as other exogenous (e...

Search, Migration, and Urban Land Use: The Case of Transportation Policies We develop a search-matching model with rural-urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steadystate equilibrium. We then consider three different policies: a transportation policy that improves the public transport system in the city, an ...

Do Family Planning Programmes Help Women’s Employment? The Case of Indian Mothers The paper deals with female employment in developing countries. We set out a model to test our argument that, at the first stage of development, demographic and health programmes have proven to be more effective for women’s position in the society than specific labour and income support policies. Our household mod...