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Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

Robert C. Allen

3.83 · Rating details · 529 ratings · 73 reviews

Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, global income differences were small, but disparities have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert C. Allen shows how the interplay of geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. Allen shows how t ...more

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Paperback, 196 pages

Published November 15th 2011 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published 2011)

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Lists with This Book

The Evolution of Wealth by Jerry D. Ward

Global Economic History by Robert C. Allen

The Industrial Revolution

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Very Short Introductions: Economics

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Jul 07, 2013 Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it

Shelves: vsis, r-r-rs, economics, history-imperial, history-europe, history-theory, history-economic

I had been asked to read this in parallel with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Unfortunately, I have gotten around it more than a year late. But I kept the GGS open beside me as I traced the economic explanations for the trajectories of the various continents/regions - and it is true this book is a good companion volume for the enormously popular GGS. It can prove to be a useful aid to go beyond some of the simplistic assumptions and still arrive at some of ...more

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Nov 24, 2018 Amira Mahmoud rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: translated, اقتصاد, للقراءة-مرة-أخرى, جعلتني-أفكر-أفضل-وأضافت-لي, تاريخ-وحضارة

كنت بحاول استوعب إيه الأفضلية المقارنة اللي الكاتب بيتكلم عنها دي لحد ما قدرت أخمن في النهاية إنه يقصد القانون الاقتصادي المعروف بالميزة النسبية، المترجم حتى معندوش أدنى معرفة اقتصادية تساعده يترجم صح ولا حتى فكر يدور في ترجمه ومعنى حاجة مشهورة ومهمة اقتصاديًا بالشكل ده!

بخلاف كدة الكتاب عظيم، ومهم جدًا، وبيطرح تفسيرات وإجابات غير معتادة عن السؤال اللي قُتل بحثًا وهو ليه في دول غنية ودول غيرها فقيرة
وأعتقد هحتاج اقراه مرة تانية، أو ارجع له في أجزاء مهمة على الأقل.
من أفضل قراءات 2018

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Sep 18, 2018 Warwick rated it liked it

Shelves: history, economics

Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes…Everybody knows.
—Leonard Cohen

Economics is a frustrating subject, managing to be both essential and eye-wateringly dull. This primer does a decent job of distilling its subject into one basic question – why the world is so unequal – and of holding your attention long enough to sketch the outlines of an answer.

Normally with such things there is a lot of hemming and hawing, bet-hedging, and phrases lik Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes…Everybody knows.
—Leonard Cohen

Economics is a frustrating subject, managing to be both essential and eye-wateringly dull. This primer does a decent job of distilling its subject into one basic question – why the world is so unequal – and of holding your attention long enough to sketch the outlines of an answer.

Normally with such things there is a lot of hemming and hawing, bet-hedging, and phrases like ‘remains to be seen’; here, refreshingly, Allen is relatively clear and unambiguous about how things came about (though less so on how they should be fixed). There is much discussion of economic policy, but plainly geographical luck had a lot to do with it – and once some economic development gets underway, it becomes a self-fuelling engine as technology substitutes for, and drives, higher wages.

This is why the technologies developed by the industrialised West can't just be imported into developing countries – they only make economic sense when workers are paid so much that investing in machines instead becomes an appealing prospect.

Western technology in the 21st century uses vast amounts of capital per worker. It only pays to substitute that much capital for labour when wages are high relative to capital costs.

And the technology brings with it newer, more specialised jobs, which in turn bring higher wages, which in turn prompts further R&D into technology that will make them obsolete…. Hence the Industrial Revolution – and other ‘industrial revolutions’ since – were the result, not just the cause, of high salaries, and countries who don't get started are stuck in a poverty trap.

Especially interesting is the discussion in the last chapter about those few countries that did manage to catch up with the West – namely Japan, South Korea, and in part the Soviet Union. China will undoubtedly join this group any second now. The only way this could be done was to construct all the elements of an advanced industrialised economy all at once – steel mills, car factories, cities, all erected as an act of will on the grounds that they would eventually all need each other. This is ‘big push’ industrialisation, but it is hardly an option for many countries, especially those still suffering the deleterious hangovers of colonialism.

You finish something like this with a lot of questions, but they are at least more specific than the questions you had going in – or that's the hope, anyway. At the very least there's enough in here to arm you against the next Jared Diamond fanatic you find yourself stuck in an elevator with.
...more

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Aug 28, 2015 سارة العاصي rated it really liked it · review of another edition

مقدمة قصيرة عن التاريخ الاقتصادي العالمي لكن مفيدة و مثيرة للفكر، لماذا بعض الدول غنية و الأخرى فقيرة؟ لماذا نهضت أوروبا لا إفريقيا؟ أسئلة قديمة الإجابة عنها جولة في تاريخ العالم و تحليل لعوامل النمو الاقتصادي ما بين بريطانيا و فترات الاستعمار و قيام أمريكا و نموذج اليابان و روسيا و الفرق بين نموذج التنمية الاقتصادي القياسي و الدفعة القوية و عوامل النجاح و الفشل لنفس النموذج في دول مختلفة.
أكد الكتاب كثيرا على نقطة أن ارتفاع الأجور يجعل الدول تتجه للتكنولوجيا و بحث تخفيض العمالة فهنا تكون تكلفة ...more

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Nov 23, 2012 Jonathan Peto rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

This "very short introduction" was fine. One point it hammered home was that there is a historical connection between high wages and growth. That came up repeatedly. Another interesting idea for me was that without the Industrial Revolution, without growth, without, I guess, consumerism, a lot of us would work hard just to subsist. The book gave me a good impression of how various factors interact and why some nations have been more successful than others. Folks, education is much more important ...more

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Jun 11, 2016 Vivek Agarwal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The perspectives in this book are not unlike the other history books I have previously read

The main difference is that this is as the title says a lot more concise and to the point

The chapter on Africa is vey interesting and shows how and why Africa has lost out on the development which the other emerging countries were able to build upon

The author is very careful in linking many variables very well through the book

Which includes the education, ago based economy, how and why the Industrial Re ...more

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Nov 07, 2017 Dorotea rated it really liked it

Allen’s writing is clear and the material is fascinating. The central topic is the big divergence, the situation that it emerged from, its causes, the situation after (the ‘big push’) .

One distinctive element of the mercantilist era it’s that it witnessed an early modern globalisation because of the discovery of the New World and new sea routes to East Indies and Americas. This lead to the rise of north-western Europe (Britain, Netherlands, France) and the contemporary relative decline of the Me Allen’s writing is clear and the material is fascinating. The central topic is the big divergence, the situation that it emerged from, its causes, the situation after (the ‘big push’) .

One distinctive element of the mercantilist era it’s that it witnessed an early modern globalisation because of the discovery of the New World and new sea routes to East Indies and Americas. This lead to the rise of north-western Europe (Britain, Netherlands, France) and the contemporary relative decline of the Mediterranean region, as well as the accumulation of human capital (knowledge of managerial techniques mainly because of the birth of corporations or joint stock companies such as the East India Company) and the improvement of existing technologies (especially in shipbuilding, weaponry, metallurgy and agriculture).
Data on incomes in the distant past are not robust, but it looks as though the differences in prosperity between countries until 1500 are small, but since the mercantilist era (1500-1800 with the voyages of Columbus and da Gama which led to an integrated global economy thanks to the Atlantic trade) an income gap has resulted from the industrial revolution and then it has expanded creating a divergence between rich and poor countries all throughout 1800s till 1913, as in the former period economic development was to the primary objective – but rather was political power. This changed in the catch-up period of the 19th century when Western Europe and the USA set four policies to close the gap with Great Britain: unification of the domestic market (creation of a unified national market by eliminating internal tariffs and building transportation infrastructure), protectionism (the erection of an external tariff to protect their industries from competition), modernization of banking ( the chartering of banks to stabilize the currency and finance industrial investment), and the establishment of mass education to upgrade the labour force.
Ronald Allen measures this gap through not only GDP per capita but also real wages of unskilled labour, which further proves the poverty trap (when wages decrease people cut back on extras such as education, luxury goods and healthy diet + when labour is cheap, the incentive to increase productivity via capital equipment is minimum-to-non-existent)
In the 20th century, the same policies proved to be less effective in countries that had not yet developed, since technology was not cost effective. There are exceptions to income divergence – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and later on Soviet Union and China today – all thanks to a degree of planning and coordination of investment (developmental government).
Phenomena that explain this divergence are the shift in world manufacturing distribution and industrialization.
...more

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Oct 28, 2018 Jaqueline rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: filosofia

Un percorso, che vede nella scoperta dell'America e nell'età delle grandi esplorazioni l'inizio della globalizzazione (che ha portato il mondo ad essere ciò che è oggi), e che cerca di rispondere a questa sola domanda: perchè esistono paesi ricchi -che possiedono supremazia economica a livello globale- e paesi poveri, che vivono nella miseria e sottostanno al dominio di un economia dettata dall'Occidente che, in passato, li ha distrutti e che tutt'ora continua a farlo? Quand'è iniziata questa gr ...more

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Sep 12, 2018 Kyle Bunkers rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, other-nonfiction

Very interesting book. At least, if you like reading about how countries industrialized, and the theories on how to effectively do so. Allen does a good job of explaining a rather convincing theory that high wages drove investments in high-capital labor saving devices/methods, which forms a positive feedback cycle, as the high-capital devices allow wages to increase, and so higher-capital devices can be introduced economically.

He also gives good accounts of other theories of how economic histor ...more

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Sep 29, 2014 Hoda Tarek rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

لماذا بدأت النهضة الإقتصادية من الغرب بالذات ولم تبدأ من أسيا وأفريقيا ؟
سؤال مهم يجيب عنه الكتاب بتفصيل عن طريق قراءة تاريخ الأمم ،
لكني هلخص الأمر في كام نقطة :

-إنجلترا بإعتبارها أكبر قوة عظمى في العالم منذ قرون خلت لم تصعد بمحض الصدفة بل بالإستعمار
وبأخذ ماثقل وزنه أو خف من الدول التي يصعد إقتصادها في ذلك الوقت كالهند مثلا
- أمريكا التي هي في الأصل خليط من بريطانيا وبقية الدول الغربية حذت حذو إنجلترا لكنها تعاملت بعنصرية أكبر وحصرت النمو الإقتصادي على طبقة نخبوية
بعدما همشت السكان الأصليين "الهن
لماذا بدأت النهضة الإقتصادية من الغرب بالذات ولم تبدأ من أسيا وأفريقيا ؟
سؤال مهم يجيب عنه الكتاب بتفصيل عن طريق قراءة تاريخ الأمم ،
لكني هلخص الأمر في كام نقطة :

-إنجلترا بإعتبارها أكبر قوة عظمى في العالم منذ قرون خلت لم تصعد بمحض الصدفة بل بالإستعمار
وبأخذ ماثقل وزنه أو خف من الدول التي يصعد إقتصادها في ذلك الوقت كالهند مثلا
- أمريكا التي هي في الأصل خليط من بريطانيا وبقية الدول الغربية حذت حذو إنجلترا لكنها تعاملت بعنصرية أكبر وحصرت النمو الإقتصادي على طبقة نخبوية
بعدما همشت السكان الأصليين "الهنود الحمر" وإستعبدت الأمريكين من أصل أفريقي ، وسمح لها تحديد الطبقة الإقتصادية بالتحكم في مسار الأموال إلا أن التمييز جاء عليها بالسلبية أخيراً حتى قررت حظره
- بقية دول أفريقيا عانت من وبال الدولتين أعلاه حيث منع أفرادها من التعليم والعمل الحر والتحكم في المال أو الأراضي ، لدرجة أنه بعد حظر العبودية إستمر أهل البلد الواحد في إستعباد أفراد من قبائل أخرى
بغرض التكسب حيث كان الإقتصاد والتجارة قد تدهورت بالفعل بسبب سيطرة الحكومات الأخرى وتفشي الجهل
- كانت الكلمة السحرية هي "التعليم" حيث إنتبهت إليه الدول الغربية وبدأت في تنميته بشكل أكبر ،حيث كانت الأمية في أمريكا تتجاوز 40% ، ولكن أسيا وأفريقيا تأخرت عن الركب و لم تنتبه له إلا مؤخرا
كما أن الوسائل والأليات المستخدمة في الصناعة والزراعة في الشرق ماهي إلا نتاج الغرب ، وقلة الإبتكار أو الإعتماد على الخامات المتاحة في البيئة هو سبب مهم لتأخر دول أسيا وأفريقيا
- أخيرا اليابان ، كيف تمكنت من النمو مع أنها من ضمن دول أسيا وعليها ما عليهم بالضبط ؟
خلال حكم الإمبراطور توكوجاوا بدأت الحكومة تنتبه إلى أنه لازال هناك وقت ممكن للحاق بالركب ، فألقت العناية الكبرى "للتعليم" بعد أن جاوزت الأمية 60% وكان نصف أفراد البلاد على خط الفقر ، وبقية العناية ألقتها لتشجيع الصناعة حيث تم إنشاء أول مصنع للحديد في عصره وللزراعه نصيب من الدعم
وتم فتح أبواب السوق الحر وتوفير المساحة للمستثمرين وكان الإعتماد الكامل على طاقة المياه والطاقة النظيفة "يعني لا بترول ولا مايحزنون" .. أدت عمليات التنميه إلى إزدهار مبهر بدأ في الثمانينات وظهرت نتائجة في القرن العشرين فقط .
ولو لاحظتم يا سيدات وسادة الرابط المشترك بين كل الإقتصاديات الناجحه : التعليم ، التعليم ، التعليم ..

*كتاب إقتصادي تاريخي مميز ، أنصح به لمن يريد تكوين فكرة شاملة ...more

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Nov 04, 2015 أحمد rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: in-my-library-hard-copy, اقتصاد, تاريخ, مقدمات-قصيرة-جدا

كتاب جيد مبني على مجموعة من البيانات التي ينهمك في تحليلها طوال الكتاب مجيبًا على تساؤل لماذا هناك دول غنية ودول فقيرة ، مرورًا بالتاريخ الإقتصادي لهذه الدول ، ويصلح لغير المتخصصين.

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Mar 28, 2017 Muhammad Hassan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: إقتصاد, سلسلة-مقدمة-قصيرة-جدا, favorites, تاريخ

كتاب جيد جدا يدور حول هذا السؤال :

ويحاول الاجابة عن طريق تحليل بيانات عديدة مهمة للتاريخ الاقتصادى للعالم بداية من 1500
ويركز الحديث اكثر عن اوروبا وقيام الثورة الصناعية فيها
وخصوصا بريطانيا ولماذا بدأت فيها وليس فى اى بلد آخر
مع عرض التاريخ الاقتصادى لدول افريقيا واسيا والامريكتين (خصوصا الولايات المتحدة)
ثم عرض نماذج دول تقدمت خارج دول اوروبا والولايات المتحدة مثل اليابان والصين

افادنى الكتاب كثيرا فى عرض لتاريخ الاقتصادى للعالم باسلوب مناسب لغير المتخصصين
وانصح به

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Jul 04, 2018 Adam rated it really liked it

Shelves: ebook, economics, history, non-fiction

This book is not so much a history of the global economy as it is a comparative study of economic development after the Industrial Revolution. Its premise is that at around 1800, most nations had more or less the same size economy relative to their population – i.e., they were all poor despite the existence of some small elite. But from that point, the richest nations experienced a spiral of growing population, GDP, education, and industrial output, while the poorest nations continued to grow sl This book is not so much a history of the global economy as it is a comparative study of economic development after the Industrial Revolution. Its premise is that at around 1800, most nations had more or less the same size economy relative to their population – i.e., they were all poor despite the existence of some small elite. But from that point, the richest nations experienced a spiral of growing population, GDP, education, and industrial output, while the poorest nations continued to grow slowly despite access to increasingly productive technology and global markets. Later, some countries in the middle became rich through another path. The general question of the book is what is that spiral of growth and what allowed it to happen in some places and not others?

The first question is arguably a variant of the Jared Diamond "cargo" question: why did economic growth take off in Europe before anywhere else, and within Europe, why in England before any other nation? Allen begins his explanation with globalization. The richest nations in Europe were those engaged in the most trade around the world (Britain and the Netherlands). That meant that, for the first time in an agrarian society, high wages were not necessarily linked to a small market for goods. Allen doesn't reference secular cycles explicitly, but the logic is the same and I think it is more clear to think of it in those terms. What would normally happen is that the price of labor and thus manufactured goods (whose costs derives mainly from labor) would be high when population is low and vice versa. There would be no incentive to invest in capital to enhance the productivity of scarce labor because the price of labor would fall faster than the market would grow. With globalization, high wages and growing international markets combined to give capitalists the incentive to invest in research and development of laborsaving technologies.

Allen takes it for granted that the IR was caused by intentional R&D spending on a social scale if not by each company. He gives a fairly in-depth treatment of the technological iterations involved in cotton production, emphatically making the point that this was a process of technological evolution driven by sustained price competition and high wages.

The British industrial sector was initially protected from competition with (primarily) Indian cotton by transport costs. The low price of labor in India and many parts of Europe prevented the immediate adoption of laborsaving technologies elsewhere, preserving the technological advantage of the British businesses long enough for them to refine the machines. In the meantime, the price of British cotton and of transportation became low enough that British companies could outcompete native manufacturing in India. I was not aware of the fact that the handicraft cotton spinning industries in India and China were largely the same proportion of the economy as they were in Britain immediately before the Industrial Revolution, but shrank to almost nothing shortly thereafter. As soon as British cotton was cheaper to produce and ship to India than local laborers could spin it by hand, those laborers were better off in the short term working in agriculture, growing food to trade for British manufactured goods.

That leads to one of the points that I found most surprising. Britain was obviously not the only country to benefit from the Industrial Revolution. So the next question is why did some countries get on the same escalating spiral while others did not? The example of India hints at one explanation: competition. As long as imports are cheaper than native products could be, it is not worthwhile to invest in capital intensive technologies to try to compete. Some countries, like the United States and Germany, had high wages and were more or less able to join the Industrial Revolution as it began. Others, like India, experienced deindustrialization. Once they had missed the beginning, it was hard to step on that later points, because the population was not being educated and wages were not growing to justify the investment.

Which raises the question that is in some ways the most relevant today: how have some nations jumped onto that spiral while others remained at the bottom? Early on, the answer seems to lie in a "standard package" of development policies including eliminating internal tariffs, imposing external tariffs, and subsidizing education and transport networks. The US and Germany, among many others, took this approach and found it very successful. What I found surprising was the emphasis answer places on external tariffs, which I assumed economists found unwelcome in practically every circumstance. The implication that developing economies imposing external tariffs is in the long-term interest of their citizens, and that countries like the US now seek to destroy because our industries are now dominant and need markets more than protection, feels more like something you would hear in a NAFTA protest than an economics book.

Conversely, this "standard package" no longer seems to be effective as of the 20th century. Because rich countries have climbed so high on the development ladder,
enormous investments are required to jump to that level. Economies of scale mean that a steel plant or an automobile factory must be extremely large to compete on an international level, and many national economies are not large enough markets to support them. The answer once again seems to contradict contemporary economic conventional wisdom: Government planning. In China, Russia, and Japan, industrial development was kick started by targeted investment from government banks, which apparently demanded large scale production on the assumption that demand would rise to meet it. While part of this process was jumping up to the current level of efficient scale, the other part involved scaling down some machinery to be efficient at current wages.

It's interesting to note the balance in explanatory mechanisms Allen offers. In general, he has little faith in a cultural or institutional explanations and tends to prefer materialist ones. He does not totally dismiss the importance of bad policy, but he emphasizes that underlying economic conditions can work around or overcome it. He gives several interesting examples of cases where cultures and governments with policies or predilections many feel should discourage economic development in fact experienced rapid growth (the most obvious being China). On the other hand, the "standard model" and Big Push models of industrialization both feel more or less entirely up to the government.

There has to be some limit to how far a "Very Short Introduction" can follow the causal chain, so it would be reasonable for Allen not to spend much time going into the political economy of why some governments made those efforts and others did not. And for the most part he does, but there are some good insights in that vein. He suggests that many of the Latin American ex-colonies (and the Southern US) persisted in extremely divided and unequal societies, in which white elites did not want to grow the economy in ways that would benefit society in general (whereas New England had a more equal economy of small farmers and merchants and a democratic spirit friendly to investing in education). Colonial governments have more or less the same relationship, though exogenous instead of endogenous. India, for instance, seems to perhaps have suffered in comparison to China for this reason. Those ambitious development policies are universally beneficial in the long run, but a major lesson I think this book emphasizes is that for the most part things progress in small steps that are all beneficial in the short term or they don't progress at all. In that light, a Big Push investment is a feat of ultracooperation that requires more social capital than many countries possess, especially among often corrupt ruling classes.

Overall it's a remarkable dense but very accessible, and very even handed intro to the topic. More discussion of the debate on certain issues might be useful. ...more

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Mar 01, 2014 John-Paul rated it really liked it

I felt quite ignorant about this topic and now that I've read this little book I feel slightly less ignorant. Allen writes quite well -- not beautifully, but efficiently -- so the reader not only gets a lot of facts but also a way of thinking about the central question of the book: Why are some countries rich and other countries poor?

His answers are reasonable and persuasive if not definitive, and squarely in the California School of history: it's mostly about access to resources and getting the ...more

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Feb 19, 2015 xhxhx rated it it was ok

It could have been so much better.

A non-Marxist center-left account. No, that's not quite right. A Listian, Leninist and Preobrazhenskyan history of the world. A history of primitive accumulation and extractive growth.

A critically incomplete account. Provides the outputs of growth, trade, and labor market models, but does not articulate their premises. Offers a dubious account of capital and technology transfer. Offers the conventional (deprecated) account of underdevelopment in the periphery. D ...more

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Nov 20, 2017 DonkeyPopsicle rated it really liked it

Industrial policy works, except for all those times when it didn't.

Good for the basics of economic history (the great divergence, the industrial revolution, etc.). Topical rather than thematic, making it better than the average VSI. Like lots of economic history, too often caught up in GDP rather than the spectrum of standard of living at a current time period (even quartiles would be nice). Still, a very good starting point.

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Aug 21, 2015 Pavlo Illashenko rated it it was amazing

Good overview, but may be a bit biased towards authors own work: sometimes you can ran into an unjustified (not very convincing) underestimation of the role of institutions. This book is useful because of generalizations and the big picture view of a very long period of economic development. If you a novice in this topic it will certainty destroy some of yours misconceptions. So, if you are ideologically biased reader, be careful, you can hurt your filings.

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Dec 31, 2016 Mykyta Kuzmenko rated it it was amazing

Очень маленькая, но очень важная книжка. Освещает экономическое развитие нового времени. В целом у книги глобальный аспект, но автор отдельно выделяет Англию, США, страны западной Европы, Латинской Америки и СССР, а также Япония и Китай. Рецептов как достичь процветания сегодня книга не дает, но приводит удачные решения перечисленных стран в прошлом. В целом дает представление о том с какой скоростью и как долго должны расти страны чтобы "догнать и перегнать".

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Dec 15, 2015 Jack rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, nonfiction

Fantastic brief book on why some countries have a lot of shit, and why other countries have much less.

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Mar 03, 2018 AnnaG rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2018, history, non-fiction, oup-vsi

A good overview of economic history. The narrative elements explaining statistically what happened when are thorough and interesting, some of the analysis seems a little superficial e.g. the authors implies in the Africa chapter that with tariffs, banks and schools any part of the world could develop and Africa was held back by colonial policies that prevented it from enacting these measures; however a chapter later he shows that Latin America did enact those policies and it still didn't work; b ...more

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Jul 06, 2018 Pete rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, economics, history

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (2011) by Robert C Allen is an excellent overview of the world's economy. Allen is a professor of economic history and clearly knows his subject in depth. The book is well written and provides an excellent overview of global economics.

The chapters are The Great Divergence, The Rise of the West, The Industrial Revolution, The Ascent of the Rich, The Great Empires, The Americas, Africa, The Standard Model and Late Industrialisation and big Push I ...more

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Sep 12, 2017 Wing rated it really liked it

This is a very concise and informative booklet. So-called prosperity stems from R&D, which is encouraged by a high wage to capital ratio, and a "standard development model" (i.e. integrated internal market, protective tariffs, universal education, and reliable domestic investment banking). An early start, relative to other competing nations, helps because, amongst other factors, minimum efficient scales enlarge with time. Geography and history matter because these dictate the initial configu ...more

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Jul 17, 2017 Diego rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historia-económica

Robert C. Allen hace una breve y brillante introducción sobre algunos de los aspectos principales detrás de las diferencias en desarrollo económico en el mundo. Desde los orígenes de la gran divergencia, hasta el proceso de convergencia de los países asiáticos. Hace un repaso por los principales eventos económicos desde 1500 y como afectaron a las diferentes regiones del mundo.

Es una buena lectura introductoria y una buena forma de refrescar la memoria sobre algunos sucesos. Allen hace un esfue ...more

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Feb 17, 2018 Luke rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, economics, geo-global, temp-modern-late

Beginning chapters were decent, middle chapters on the Americas and Africa were excellent, last chapters were lacking. The chapter on the Americas was especially illuminating. Allen seems to take a "one size fits all" approach, which I don't think is a good way of seeing the history of economic "development," but this book does function as an excellent introduction to the subject.

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Dec 21, 2017 vikram chandran rated it really liked it

It's well written, very concise, and pulls its central theory together well. It illustrates how much the invisible hand of economics drives decision making as well as the growth trajectory for different countries. With respect to India - the book illustrates the size of the missed opportunity for the world's largest country to grow and prosper. A thought-provoking read...

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Dec 01, 2018 Ryan rated it really liked it

Delivers on the title's promise. Very dense with interesting info. I'm not ready to evaluate most of its arguments, but from what I can tell it's a fair and concise summary. Really whets your appetite for economic history

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Nov 26, 2018 Gevorg Yeghikyan rated it it was amazing

An excellent clear introduction to the principles and logic behind the economic policies nations have been carrying out throughout centuries, and which underlie the one question every person has asked themselves: why and how are some countries rich and others poor? Much recommended!

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Jan 19, 2017 Michael Bee rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Great starter book on economic theory

I start a book listing / looking at the bibliography. The more foreign, cryptic/puzzling the better. This passed the test! I don't think you will come out the other side of this read quite the same as you were before reading!!

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