Early Starts, Reversals and Catch‐up in the Process of Economic Development*

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic history, and that the "reversal of fortune" associated with European overseas expansion from about 1500 to 1960 was an exception. We demonstrate that the colonial era reversal was in the process of being reversed in recent decades, and that this second reversal is in line with longer-term trends dating back to the first agricultural revolution. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

State history and economic development: evidence from six millennia

“…Roughly the same data set was also used by Chanda and Putterman (2005), and Chanda and Putterman (2007). Bockstette et al's data were subsequently expanded to include more ex-Communist countries (Iliev and Putterman 2007), more African countries (Cinyabuguma and Putterman 2011), and a few other countries for which complementary income or other required data had initially been viewed as unreliable.…”

State history, historical legitimacy and modern ethnic diversity

“…This is a measure of how long national (non-tribal) states have been in existence (whether colonial or not). Chanda and Putterman (2007) and Putterman and Weil (2010) show that this variable is correlated with current economic development, whilst Ang (2013aAng ( , 2013b Bockstette et al (2002), but the variation across former colonies between the two sources is quite different, so the two concepts are by no means identical in practice.…”

“…We use the elapsed time since the transition to agriculture from Chanda and Putterman (2007) as an instrument for State Antiquity, given that the transition to agriculture fostered property…”

Political institutions since 1820

“…One indicator that could be used as a proxy of governance is the state antiquity index 3 (Bockstette et al, 2002;Chanda and Putterman, 2007): however, this index shows only a very small variation over time, providing meaningful and visually appealing information only in a cross-sectional analysis. 4 for this reason the scope of this chapter is limited to measures of democracy.…”