Technology in the Great DivergenceGregory Clark, Robert Feenstra
NBER Working Paper No. 8596 In this paper, we examine the changes in per-capita income and productivity from 1700 to modern times, and show four things: (1) that incomes per capita diverged more around the world after 1800 than before; (2) that the source of this divergence was increasing differences in the efficiency of economies; (3) that these differences in efficiency were not due to problems of poor countries in getting access to the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution; (4) that the pattern of trade from the late nineteenth century between the poor and the rich economies suggests that the problem of the poor economies was peculiarly a problem of employing labor effectively. This continues to be true today. Published: Technology in the Great Divergence, Gregory Clark, Robert C. Feenstra, in Globalization in Historical Perspective (2003), University of Chicago Press This paper is available as PDF (338 K) or via email.
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