Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE ECONOMICS
- PART TWO ECONOMIC HISTORY
- 4 Why Isn't the Whole World Developed?
- 5 Kuznets Cycles and Modern Economic Growth
- 6 Industrial Revolution and Mortality Revolution: Two of a Kind?
- 7 How Beneficent Is the Market? A Look at the Modern History of Mortality
- PART THREE DEMOGRAPHY
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Why Isn't the Whole World Developed?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE ECONOMICS
- PART TWO ECONOMIC HISTORY
- 4 Why Isn't the Whole World Developed?
- 5 Kuznets Cycles and Modern Economic Growth
- 6 Industrial Revolution and Mortality Revolution: Two of a Kind?
- 7 How Beneficent Is the Market? A Look at the Modern History of Mortality
- PART THREE DEMOGRAPHY
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is now over two centuries since the coming of modern economic growth was signaled by James Watt's invention of the single-acting steam engine. In this period, output per capita and per unit of labor input have risen at long-term rates never seen before in human history – first in northern and western Europe and North America; then, in the period up to 1950, in Japan, southern and eastern Europe, Oceania, and parts of Latin America; and, finally, since World War II, in much of the rest of the world. The great disparity among regions in the timing of the onset of modern economic growth has produced the current immense gap in living levels between the more and less developed countries of the world (Chapter 3, Table 3.3, line 1).
The primary task of the discipline of economic history is to describe and explain economic change in the past. Given the unprecedented geographic contrasts in economic growth over the last two centuries, an objective look at historical experience would not, I think, place the questions that have so long dominated the study of economic history in the foreground. The preoccupation of Western scholars with American and European – largely northwestern European – economic history can only seem provincial, for the striking feature about these areas is the fundamental similarity in their experience.
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- Information
- The Reluctant EconomistPerspectives on Economics, Economic History, and Demography, pp. 57 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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