Peter Foldvari

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Economics

This chapter establishes an empirical relationship among per capita national income, human capital formation (measured as a combination of literacy, education and life expectancy) and language situation in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that both the use of local and official languages contribute to increased human capital which further induce income...

The number of books published in a country reflects its economic, social and cultural development. Yet, all too often, the production of books is looked upon solely in economic terms, i.e. as a part of national income, or as a proxy for human capital which, in turn, might explain economic growth. In this paper, we aim to give books their day in cou...

This chapter establishes an empirical relationship among per capita national income, human capital formation (measured as a combination of literacy, education and life expectancy) and language situation in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that both the use of local and official languages contribute to increased human capital which further induce income...

This chapter provides an overview of the economic history of Central and Eastern Europe. The focus is initially placed on the region’s first round of modernisation, between 1850 and 1914. Subsequently, the chapter discusses the introduction of socialism and central planning after World War II and its implications for the region’s economic growth an...

In recent decades it has been debated whether China’s growth performance is primarily driven by capital accumulation (more inputs) or rather by an increase in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth (better technology and institutions). The answer to this question may offer a glimpse into the future trends of China’s economic growth. If the perspira...

In this paper we use the components of the PolityIV project’s polity2 and Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy indicators to analyse the relationship between de jure and de facto political institutions from 1820 until 2000 with a canonical correlation method corrected for the sample selection bias. We find considerable fluctuation in the relationship betw...

Despite a consensus about the main factors influencing economic mobility in Indonesia, such as labor-market opportunities and childhood circumstances, virtually nothing is known about how these factors increased economic standing in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The use of height data as a proxy for people’s economic situation, however, fi...

Languages are one of the most naturally evolving human institutions. Although the official status and development of languages is closely associated with the well-being of their speakers in multilingual societies, this issue gains only a marginal attention in economics and development studies. Our paper aims to reveal the long-term determinants of...

According to the consensus view, it was primarily physical capital accumulation that drove economic growth during the early years of state socialism. Growth models incorporating both human and physical capital accumulation led to the conclusion that a high physical/human capital ratio can cause a lower economic growth in the long run, hence offerin...

Here, we discuss the role of both perspiration factors (physical and human capital) and inspiration factors (Total Factor Productivity) in the economic development of the Former Soviet Union area (FSU) and China, ca. 1920–2010. Using a newly created dataset, we find that during the Socialist central-planning period, economic growth in both countrie...

Political institutions determine the degree of freedom people enjoy and their capacity to influence their social and political environment. This chapter provides historical evidence on the evolution of political institutions drawing upon two major research projects: the PolityIV dataset and the Vanhanen dataset, which focuses on electoral participa...

This chapter focuses on income inequality as measured by gross (i.e. pre-tax) household income across individuals within a country. It builds upon a number of large-scale initiatives to chart income inequality trends over time, supplementing them with data on wages and heights for the earlier period. Income inequality trends follow a U-shape in mos...

Personal security reflects a crucial component of well-being. This chapter relies on homicide rates (the number of intentional deaths per 100 000 inhabitants) to trace changes of violence in time and space. It finds that Western Europe was already quite peaceful from the 19th century onwards, but homicide rates in the United States have been high b...

Recently, more and more use is made from book production as a measure of the long-run development of human capital. However, its relation with technology and growth is often found to be small and changing over time. In this paper we try to establish the link between book production and the spread of "ideas" as proxied by patents both over time and...

Personal security is a very important component of the standard of living. Security is not only reduced by deficient health or poverty – on which separate chapters are included in this volume – but also by serious crimes and by war and other large-scale conflicts. These are potentially important threats to personal security of human beings, henc...

In this paper, we revisit the relationship between educational and income inequalities in a historical perspective, using a newly developed annual dataset of average years of education in Europe. Theoretically one would expect a reduction in educational inequality should, given the positive correlation between education level and income, initially...

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 a...

The study of heights provides a promising approach to a better understanding of the biological welfare of countries and regions for which conventional economic data are relatively sparse. This paper is based on a dataset previously unexploited: the individual records of nearly 10,000 Indonesian men conscripted into the Royal Netherlands East Indies...

Migration always played an important role in Dutch society. However, little quantitative evidence on its effect on economic development is known for the period before the twentieth century even though some stories exist about their effect on the Golden Age. Applying a VAR analysis on a new dataset on migration and growth for the period 1570–1800, w...

The role of human capital in economic growth is now largely uncontested. One indicator of human capital frequently used for the pre-1900 period is age heaping, which has been increasingly used to measure gender-specific differences. In this note, we find that in some historical samples, married women heap significantly less than unmarried women. Th...

In this paper we estimate inequality in Indonesia between 1932 and 1999. There was an increase in inequality at the start of this period but then a sharp decline from the 1960s. A shift from domestic to export agriculture over the period up to the Great Depression accounts for the increase in inequality. During the 1930s, as the price of export cro...

Migration always played an important role in Dutch society. However, little quantitative evidence on its effect on economic development is known for the period before the 20th century even though some stories exist about their effect on the Golden Age. Applying a new dataset on migration and growth for the period 1510-1900 in a system of equations,...

In this paper we try to establish the link between book production and the spread of “ideas” as proxied by patents. Two mechanisms may be distinguished. First, in the initial phase of economic development, the production of books may stimulate the accumulation of knowledge already present in society. After such an accumulation is complete, books ma...

To date, the rise and fall of the (former) USSR has triggered a lot of research. Many have focused 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. The...

In this paper, we tried to address the issue how education affect economic welfare. We find that in the long-run neither education nor physical capital affects per capita income growth. This seems to suggest that it were inspiration (i.e. TFP) rather than perspiration (i.e. education and physical capital) factors that drove economic development. Ho...

Until quite recently, GDP growth between ca. 1 ce and the late Middle Ages was considered non-existent or even negative. Recently, largely on account of increasing interest in historical national accounting, the late-medieval figures have been revised upward, in line with an upward adjustment in the estimated shares of manufacturing and pasture. Le...

Recent research has shown early economies to exhibit market behavior by using institutions that reduce price volatility. In this paper we focus on storage as a price stabilizing strategy in Babylon using a recent dataset with agricultural prices for the Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods (ca. 400 – 65 BC). This dataset allows us to assess the...

The development in the working of markets has been an important topic in economic history for decades. The volatility of market prices is often used as an indicator of market efficiency in the broadest sense. Yet, the way in which volatility is estimated often makes it difficult to compare price volatility across regions or over time for two reason...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of both human and physical capital in economic growth in Hungary during the 20th century by extending the already available data on physical and human capital. Besides the standard measure for the volume of human capital, we develop a simple method to estimate the value of the human capital stock i...

A new dataset for estimating 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, and two sets of benchmarks for estimating between-country inequality (the Maddison 1990 benchmark and the recent 2005 ICP round), we...

In this paper, we revisit the question whether inequality in education and human capital is closely related to income inequality. Using the most popular functional forms describing the relationship between, first, output and human capital and, second, education and human capital, we find that the effect of inequality in schooling on income inequali...

Central and Eastern Europe is a region with widely divergent development paths. Up to WWII, these countries experienced comparable growth patterns. Yet, whereas Austria and West Germany remained part of the capitalist West and underwent periods of rapid growth, other countries, under state-socialist regimes, experienced on average far lower growth...

In this article we carry out a time-series analysis on monthly HUF-EUR exchange rate data using both the Engle-Granger and Johansen methodology in order to find evidence for Purchasing Power and Uncovered Interest Rate Parities. Our results confirm that the producer price indices and the exchange rates are co-integrated with two co-integration vect...

The author estimates the Gini coefficients of income inequality in Hungary between 1928 and 1941, on the basis of official income tax statistics. Because only one point on the Lorenz curve is known, he bases his estimation on the assumption that the income has either log-normal distribution or Pareto distribution. He finds that, assuming log normal...

The majority of the empirical literature uses average years of education as a proxy of the human capital stock. Based on Lucas (1988) we argue that the level of average years of education can also be seen as a proxy for the growth rate of the per capita human capital stock. This has fundamental impact on the interpretation of the coefficient and ma...

The average years of education, an indicator of the average educational attainment in a population, is a widely used proxy of human capital stock in the empirical literature. Its application is somewhat limited by data availability, even though annual series have already been created for a few countries. This paper offers an annual series of the av...

Can the development of the world economy – the growth of global gross domestic product and the increase in global inequality – in the period from 1820 to 2003 be understood as the result of the spread of one fundamental ‘innovation’, the Industrial Revolution? This paper tries to establish how the ‘convergence club’ evolves over time (w...

There is a general consensus that human capital is a major factor behind long-run economic growth. Yet, on a macro level, the empirical results do not always seem to concur with this view. To explain this gap between theory and empirics, more focus has been laid on measurement error and data quality. Using an alternative estimate of the stock of hu...

There is a general consensus that human capital is a major determinant of economic development. However, the range of available human capital variables is very wide in both a technical and a theoretical sense, so that different human capital measures are sometimes only loosely correlated. This is partly because they capture different aspects of hum...

A lakosság átlagos iskolázottsága (években kifejezve) jelentőségteljesebb indikátornak mutatkozik, mint az emberitőke-állomány proxy változója. A jelenleg elérhető adatbázisok hátránya, hogy a becslések csak bizonyos évekre elérhetők (általában minden ötö- dik vagy tízedik évre), és a források és módszerek sokszínűsége miatt az egyes országokra ado...

Using the method suggested by Dagum and Slottje (2000), this study estimates the value of national and per capita human capital for six Central and Eastern European countries: Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Russia. The estimates are based on available household surveys for 1993, 1995, and 1997. The results indicate that the per c...

The main objective and motivation of this thesis is to provide the reader with a quantitative analysis focusing on the impact of the European Integration on the Netherlands exclusively. To this end, two major and one minor research questions are addressed. The first main question focuses on the impact that European Integration has on the Dutch fore...

A tudásprémium (skill-premium), és összefüggései a technológiai fejlődéssel, illetve a nemzetközi kereskedelemmel az utóbbi évtizedben a közgazdaságtan fontos kutatási területévé váltak. A tanulmány, mintegy bevezetve a témakörbe, a legújabb szakirodalom alapján összefoglalja a tudásprémiummal kapcsolatos legofntosabb elméleti munkák eredményeit. A...

A klasszikus kereskedelemelmélet azon az alapon szorgalmazza a nemzetközi kereskedelem liberalizálását, hogy az jelentősen hozzájárul a jólét növekedéséhez. A tanulmány ennek a feltételezésnek az empirikus vizsgálatát tűzi ki célul a külpiaci nyitottság és az egy főre jutó GDP közötti kapcsolat elemzése révén, amelyet egy 22 OECD-tagállamból álló m...

Human capital has become a focal point of research during the last decades. Especially the "average years of education", an indicator of the average educational attainment in a population, is a widely used proxy of human capital stock in the empirical literature. Its application is somewhat limited by the availability of data, even though annual se...

Price volatility, reflecting the ability to absorb exogenous supply- or demand shocks, is an important dimension of market performance. In this paper we present a model to study the factors determining the price volatility of markets of basic foodstuffs in pre industrial societies. This model is used to explain the development of price volatility o...

In this paper we apply a two-level CES production function to analyze the possible effect of different allocation of skills in the labour market, more precisely, the share of skilled and unskilled labourers on economic growth and steady-state output. We find that the higher the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour, the hi...

On the one hand, many studies argue that physical capital accumulation drove economic growth in the early socialist period. Other studies, however, have argued that the physical/human capital ratio was negatively related to economic growth implying that fast growth of physical capital may lead to lower economic growth. In this paper we show theoret...

The development in the working of markets has been an important topic in economic history for decades. The volatility of market prices is often used as an indicator of market efficiency in the broadest sense. Yet, the way in which volatility is estimated often makes it difficult to compare price volatility across regions or over time for two reason...