How well did facts travel to support protracted debate on the history of the Great Divergence between Western Europe and Imperial China?

Kent Deng and Patrick O'Brien

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: With the ongoing debate of the Great Divergence since 2000, a wide range of works have been published to compare economic performance of Western Europe with that of China. The upsurge in the divergence scholarship has however been dogged by an issue of reliability and compatibility of ‘facts’. A reason is that non-Chinese speaking academics tend to accept stylised facts from Chinese sources too readily without checking, which makes, more often than not, the Chinese part of the story a liability rather than an asset. We here challenge that well-circulated notion that ‘any number is better than no number’: No number does not make any number right.

Keywords: Great Divergence; information quality; information reliability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N01 N10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2017-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/69923/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:69923

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().