This is a definitive new account of Britain's economic evolution from a backwater of Europe in 1270 to the hub of the global economy in 1870. A team of leading economic historians reconstruct Britain's national accounts for the first time right back into the thirteenth century to show what really happened quantitatively during the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to traditional views of the earlier period as one of Malthusian stagnation, they reveal how the transition to modern economic growth built on the earlier foundations of a persistent upward trend in GDP per capita which doubled between 1270 and 1700. Featuring comprehensive estimates of population, land use, agricultural production, industrial and service-sector production and GDP per capita, as well as analysis of their implications, this will be an essential reference for anyone interested in British economic history and the origins of modern economic growth more generally.

A new dataset for charting the development of global inequality between 1820 and 2000 is presented, based on a large variety of sources and methods for estimating (gross household) income inequality. On this basis we estimate the evolution of global income inequality over the past two centuries. Two sets of benchmarks about between‐country inequality (the Maddison 1990 benchmark and the recent 2005 ICP round) are taken into account. We find that between 1820 and 1950, increasing per capita income is combined with increasing global inequality. After 1950, global inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient or the Theil index remains more or less constant. It also appears that the global income distribution was uni‐modal in the nineteenth century, became increasingly bi‐modal between 1910 and 1970 with two world wars, a depression and de‐globalization, and was suddenly transformed back into a uni‐modal distribution between 1980 and 2000.

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Britain's labour force industrialised early. The industrial and service sectors already accounted for 40 per cent of the labour force in 1381, and a substantial further shift of labour out of agriculture occurred between 1522 and 1700. From the early seventeenth century rising agricultural labour productivity underpinned steadily increasing employment in industry and services, so that by 1759 agriculture's share of the labour force had shrunk to 37 per cent and industry's grown to 34 per cent. Thereafter, industry's output acceleration during the Industrial Revolution owed more to gains in labour productivity consequent upon mechanisation than the expansion of employment.JEL classification: J21, N13, N33, O14, O52

This paper pulls together many primary and secondary sources to arrive at consistent estimates of national income for china between the 17th and 20th centuries. We find, in line with much of the literature, that GDP per capita declined between the mid-17th and 19th centuries. This trend reversed during the 19th century, mainly due to a shift into services and, for the late 19th century onwards, also in industry. Since these sectors exhibited higher labour productivity, this fostered economic growth. This pattern of decreasing share of services and industry from the 17th century and increasing shares in the 19th century is common in many Asian countries except Japan. The reasons for this development, however, are unclear. The standard ultimate factors of growth such as institutions (low marriage age for women, exclusive society) and geography apply to almost all Asian countries. Hence, more research is necessary.

To date, the rise and fall of the (former) USSR has triggered a lot of research much of which has focussed on the accumulation of physical capital, growth, and consumption. Recently, also the accumulation of human capital has increasingly been incorporated in this picture. However, few datasets exist that cover this crucial variable for this vast area. Therefore, our main objective is to make available a new dataset that contains human capital related time-series for the USSR (and the Newly Independent States (NIS) after its dissolution), constructed mostly on an annual basis. These data are drawn together from various primary sources, available datasets and secondary literature where our focus was on constructing a dataset as consistent as possible. It is our hope that, by supplying these data in electronic format, it will significantly advance quantitative economic history research on Russia and all over the former Soviet Union area (FSU) and will inspire further research in various new fields relating to intellectual production. The data presented in this paper follow after the discussion of the information value of the primary sources utilised, and the various problems that arose when linking and splicing the data from various sources. After constructing series of human capital indicators we perform a time-series and spatial analysis in order to identify the long-term trends of education penetration and of the human capital development in the FSU area with a strong emphasis on inequality issues between the NIS. Applying these results in a simple growth accounting framework provides us with some preliminary insights on the role of human capital in economic development in the FSU area.

The quantum transport of vortices in very long and narrow arrays of small Josephson junctions is studied experimentally. We investigate the forming of a Mott insulator in periodic arrays. When the vortex density is commensurate with the one-dimensional periodic potential, the vortices localize due to the strong repulsive vortex-vortex interaction. We explore the influence of interaction strength, bandwidth, sample geometry, and temperature on the stability of the Mott states. ͓S0163-1829͑98͒01018-2͔

We estimate inequality in Indonesia between 1932 and 2008. Inequality increased at the start of this period but declined sharply from the 1960s onwards. The increase was due to a shift from domestic to export agriculture over the period up to the Great Depression. During the 1930s, as the price of export crops declined, the income of rich farmers suffered a blow. Yet this was counterbalanced by an increasing gap between expenditures in the urban and rural sectors, causing an overall rise in inequality. As for the second half of the century, we find that the employment shift towards manufacturing and services-combined with an increase in labour productivity in agriculture-accounts for inequality's decline, which was halted in the 1990s. These inequality trends affected poverty as well, but prior to the 1940s the negative impact of the rise in inequality was offset by an increase in per capita GDP.Between 1950 and 1980 a decline in inequality, combined with increased per capita GDP, rapidly raised a large portion of the population above the poverty line.