Escaping poverty : the origins of modern economic growth / Peer Vries.
One of the biggest debates in economic history deals with the Great Divergence. How can we explain that at a certain moment in time (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) a certain part of the world (the West) escaped from general poverty and became much richer than it had ever been before and th...
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Goettingen : [Vienna] :
V & R Unipress ; Vienna University Press,
©2013.
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Table of Contents:
- Machine generated contents note: 1. emergence and non-emergence of modern economic growth
- 2. Taking off and falling (further) behind
- 3. Two case studies: Great Britain and China in the very long eighteenth century
- 4. Continuity and change, inevitability and contingency
- 5. Old cliches about Asia's economic past that are no longer tenable
- 6. Income, growth and wealth: problems of measurement
- 7. Industrial Revolution and Great Divergence
- 8. Malthusian constraints, premodern growth and modern growth
- pt. one Economists and theories of economic growth
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Land, resources, geography
- 3. Labour: the effect of quantities
- 4. Labour quality: human capital
- 5. Consumption
- 6. Capital and capital accumulation
- 7. Specialisation and exchange
- 8. Innovation
- 9. Institutions: property rights, markets and states
- 10. Culture and economic growth
- pt. two Actual explanations of the Great Divergence
- 1. Great Divergence and geography
- 2. Geography, factor endowments and institutions
- 3. Geography and institutions: Britain and China, wheat versus rice
- 4. Geography: town versus countryside, urbanising Great Britain and rural China
- 5. Labour: scarcity and abundance
- 6. Factor endowments: labour-saving Britain versus labour-absorbing China
- 7. High wages and low wages: stimuli and traps?
- 8. Labour-extensive and labour-intensive routes to growth?
- 9. Human capital: labour and its skills
- 10. Human capital: labour and discipline
- 11. Consumption
- 12. Accumulation, income and wealth
- 13. Primitive accumulation: bullion and slaves
- 14. Intercontinental trade
- 15. Globalisation and Great Divergence: How the Third World came into existence
- 16. Ghost acreages
- 17. Innovation provides the key rather than accumulation or ghost acreage
- 18. Innovation: technology and science
- 19. seriously underestimated factor: enhanced productivity because of institutional and organisational innovation
- 20. Ultimate causes: institutions
- 21. Markets and property rights
- 22. Institutions: markets and varieties of pre-industrial capitalism
- 23. Wage labour and world-system: Why it does not make sense to call Qing China capitalist and why capitalism's origins should be considered uniquely Western
- 24. Markets: sizes and characteristics
- 25. institution of institutions: The role of the state, in particular that of Britain
- 26. Was industrialising Britain a developmental state?
- 27. European state system and the development of civil society: the non-monopolisation of the sources of social power
- 28. Culture and growth: Western cultural exceptionalism and how to measure it
- 29. Culture does make a difference. But how can one convincingly prove that?
- Why not China?
- world of striking differences
- Concluding comments
- 1. Geography
- 2. Labour and consumption
- 3. Accumulation
- 4. Specialisation and exchange
- 5. Innovation
- 6. Institutions: markets, property rights and states
- 7. Culture
- coda on Great Britain and China
- Bibliography
- Epilogue: A rise of the East?
- 1. How did the West rise?
- 2. Will Western growth persist?
- 3. Will Eastern growth persist?
- 4. Some educated guesses.