Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Alexander Gerschenkron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Alexander Gerschenkron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description


Explaining Economic Backwardness

Explaining Economic Backwardness PDF Author: Anna Sosnowska
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789633862919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This monograph is about an exciting episode in the intellectual history of Europe: the vigorous debate among leading Polish historians on the sources of the economic development and non-development, including the origins of economic divisions within Europe. The work covers nearly fifty years of this debate between the publication of two pivotal works in 1947 and 1994. Anna Sosnowska provides an insightful interpretation of how local and generational experience shaped the notions of post-1945 Polish historians about Eastern European backwardness, and how their debate influenced Western historical sociology, social theories of development and dependency in peripheral areas, and the image of Eastern Europe in Western, Marxist-inspired social science. Although created under the adverse conditions of state socialism and censorship, this body of scholarship had an important repercussion in international social science of the post-war period, contributing an emphasis on international comparisons, as well as a stress on social theory and explanations. Sosnowska's analysis also helps to understand current differences that lead to conflicts between Europe's richest and economically most developed core and its southern and eastern peripheries. The historians she studies also investigated analogies between paths in Eastern Europe and regions of West Africa, Latin America and East Asia.

Continuity in History and Other Essays

Continuity in History and Other Essays PDF Author: Alexander Gerschenkron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Distant Tyranny

Distant Tyranny PDF Author: Regina Grafe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691144842
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Spain's development from a premodern society into a modern unified nation-state with an integrated economy was painfully slow and varied widely by region. Economic historians have long argued that high internal transportation costs limited domestic market integration, while at the same time the Castilian capital city of Madrid drew resources from surrounding Spanish regions as it pursued its quest for centralization. According to this view, powerful Madrid thwarted trade over large geographic distances by destroying an integrated network of manufacturing towns in the Spanish interior. Challenging this long-held view, Regina Grafe argues that decentralization, not a strong and powerful Madrid, is to blame for Spain's slow march to modernity. Through a groundbreaking analysis of the market for bacalao--dried and salted codfish that was a transatlantic commodity and staple food during this period--Grafe shows how peripheral historic territories and powerful interior towns obstructed Spain's economic development through jurisdictional obstacles to trade, which exacerbated already high transport costs. She reveals how the early phases of globalization made these regions much more externally focused, and how coastal elites that were engaged in trade outside Spain sought to sustain their positions of power in relation to Madrid. Distant Tyranny offers a needed reassessment of the haphazard and regionally diverse process of state formation and market integration in early modern Spain, showing how local and regional agency paradoxically led to legitimate governance but economic backwardness.

The Economic Future in Historical Perspective

The Economic Future in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Paul A. David
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197263471
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
In this volume, leading modern economic historians show how analysis of past experiences contributes to a better understanding of present-day economic conditions; they offer important insights into major challenges that will occupy the attention of policy makers in the coming decades. The seventeen essays are organised around three major themes, the first of which is the changing constellation of forces sustaining long-run economic growth in market economies. The second major theme concerns the contemporary challenges posed by transitions in economic and political regimes, and by ideologies that represent legacies from past economic conditions that still affect policy responses to new 'crises'. The third theme is modern economic growth's diverse implications for human economic welfare - in terms of economic security, nutritional and health status, and old age support - and the institutional mechanisms communities have developed to cope with the risks that individuals are exposed to by the concomitants of rising prosperity.

Roots of Brazilian Relative Economic Backwardness

Roots of Brazilian Relative Economic Backwardness PDF Author: Alexandre Rands Barros
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128097574
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Roots of Brazil's Relative Economic Backwardness explains Brazil's development level in light of modern theories regarding economic growth and international economics. It focuses on both the proximate and fundamental causes of Brazil's slow development, turning currently dominant hypotheses upside down. To support its arguments, the book presents extensive statistical analysis of Brazilian long-term development, with some new series on per capita GDP, population ethnical composition, and human capital stock, among others. It is an important resource in the ongoing debate on the causes of Latin American underdeveloped economies. - Argues that low human capital accumulation is the major source of Brazilian relative underdevelopment - Considers class conflict as the major determinant of Brazil's historically low human capital accumulation and underdevelopment - Presents new statistical information about Brazilian early development

Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th-20th Centuries

Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th-20th Centuries PDF Author: Jacek Kochanowicz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351125400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
The subject of this book is the economic backwardness of Poland and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The studies in the first part analyse various aspects of the region's economic and social history in the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries, such as the nature of peasant economics, the character of economic evolution, and the ambiguity of social and economic relations between Poland and "the West". The second part deals with the change following the fall of state socialism. Papers in this part argue that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies. It is also important to look at the process of this recent change comparatively, both within Eastern Europe and comparing this region with other parts of the world. Professor Kochanowicz's contention in these essays is that the so-called transformation has had to cope not only with the effects of state socialism, but also with a much longer legacy of backwardness.

The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945

The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945 PDF Author: Andrew C. Janos
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400843022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Why did Hungary, a country that shared much of the religious and institutional heritage of western Europe, fail to replicate the social and political experiences of the latter in the nineteenth and early twenties centuries? The answer, the author argues, lies not with cultural idiosyncracies or historical accident, but with the internal dynamics of the modern world system that stimulated aspirations not easily realizable within the confines of backward economics in peripheral national states. The author develops his theme by examining a century of Hungarian economic, social, and political history. During the period under consideration, the country witnessed attempts to transplant liberal institutions from the West, the corruption of these institutions into a "neo-corporatist" bureaucratic state, and finally, the rise of diverse Left and Right radical movements as much in protest against this institutional corruption as against the prevailing global division of labor and economic inequality. Pointing to significant analogies between the Hungarian past and the plight of the countries of the Third World today, this work should be of interest not only to the specialist on East European politics, but also to students of development, dependency, and center-periphery relations in the contemporary world.

An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe

An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe PDF Author: Ivan Berend
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107030706
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
A transnational survey of the economic development of Europe, exploring why some regions advanced and some stayed behind.

Why Australia Prospered

Why Australia Prospered PDF Author: Ian W. McLean
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691171335
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book is the first comprehensive account of how Australia attained the world's highest living standards within a few decades of European settlement, and how the nation has sustained an enviable level of income to the present. Why Australia Prospered is a fascinating historical examination of how Australia cultivated and sustained economic growth and success. Beginning with the Aboriginal economy at the end of the eighteenth century, Ian McLean argues that Australia's remarkable prosperity across nearly two centuries was reached and maintained by several shifting factors. These included imperial policies, favorable demographic characteristics, natural resource abundance, institutional adaptability and innovation, and growth-enhancing policy responses to major economic shocks, such as war, depression, and resource discoveries. Natural resource abundance in Australia played a prominent role in some periods and faded during others, but overall, and contrary to the conventional view of economists, it was a blessing rather than a curse. McLean shows that Australia's location was not a hindrance when the international economy was centered in the North Atlantic, and became a positive influence following Asia's modernization. Participation in the world trading system, when it flourished, brought significant benefits, and during the interwar period when it did not, Australia's protection of domestic manufacturing did not significantly stall growth. McLean also considers how the country's notorious origins as a convict settlement positively influenced early productivity levels, and how British imperial policies enhanced prosperity during the colonial period. He looks at Australia's recent resource-based prosperity in historical perspective, and reveals striking elements of continuity that have underpinned the evolution of the country's economy since the nineteenth century.