DONDENA Seminar - Stephen Broadberry

“Innovation and the Great Divergence”

SPEAKER: Stephen Broadberry (University of Oxford)

ABSTRACT:

Recent developments in historical national accounting suggest that the timing of the Great Divergence hinges on the different trends in northwest Europe and the Yangzi Delta region of China. The positive trend of GDP per capita in northwest Europe after 1700 was a continuation of a process that began in the fourteenth century, while the negative trend in the Yangzi Delta continued a pattern of alternating periods of growing and shrinking, but reaching a new lower level. These GDP per capita trends were driven by different paths of innovation. TFP growth was strongly positive in Britain after the Black Death, in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century and again in Britain from the mid-seventeenth century. Although TFP growth was positive in China during the Northern Song dynasty, it was predominantly negative during the Ming and Qing dynasties, in the Yangzi Delta as well as in China as a whole. 


BIO:

Stephen Broadberry is a Professorial fellow and a Professor of Economic History, Oxford University. He is also a Research Theme Leader at CAGE, University of Warwick and Director of the Economic History Programme at CEPR. He has also taught at the London School of Economics and the Universities of Warwick and Cardiff and held visiting positions at University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, Humboldt University, Berlin, UPF Barcelona and Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. He has been Editor of the Economic History Review, and also Editor of the European Review of Economic History. He is currently President of the Economic History Society and has been President of the European Historical Economics Society and a Trustee of a number of other economic history organisations, including the Asian Historical Economics Society, the Cliometric Society, the Economic History Association and the International Economic History Association. His books include The British Economy Between the Wars: A Macroeconomic Survey (Blackwell, 1986); The Productivity Race, 1850-1990: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850-1990 (CUP, 1997); Market Services and the Productivity Race, 1850-2000: British Performance in International Perspective (CUP, 2006), the 2-volume Cambridge Economic History of Europe, edited with Kevin O’Rourke (CUP, 2010) and British Economic Growth, 1270-1870, co-authored with Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen (CUP, 2015). Research Interests: (1) The development of the world economy from 1000 AD to the present, using a historical national accounting approach to shed light on the Great Divergence of productivity and living standards between Europe and Asia (2) sectoral aspects of comparative growth and productivity performance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the role of services (3) wars and economic performance.