1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910169179503321

Autore

Vries P. H. H

Titolo

Escaping poverty : the origins of modern economic growth / / Peer Vries

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Göttingen : , : V&R Unipress, , [2013]

©2013

ISBN

3-7370-0168-5

3-8470-0168-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (516 p.)

Disciplina

339.4

339.46

Soggetti

Poverty

Poverty - China

Poverty - Great Britain

China Economic conditions 20th century

Great Britain Economic conditions 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

Title Page; Copyright; Table of Contents; Body; Introduction; 1. The 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 clichés 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; Part one: Economists and theories of economic growth

1. Introduction2. 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; Part two: Actual explanations of the Great Divergence; 1. The 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 abundance6. 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 acreage18. Innovation: technology and science; 19. A 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. The institution of institutions: The role of the state, in particular that of Britain26. Was industrialising Britain a developmental state?; 27. The 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?; A 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

Sommario/riassunto

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 than the rest of the world? Many prominent scholars discussed this question and came up with many different answers. This book provides a systematic analysis of the most important of those answers by means of an analysis of possible explanations in terms of natural resources, labour, capital, the divi