Comparative European Institutions and the Great Divergence

Antonio Henriques and Nuno Palma

FEP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto

Abstract: Why did the countries which first benefited from access to the New World – Castile and Portugal – decline relative to their followers, especially England and the Netherlands? The dominant narrative is that worse initial institutions at the time of the opening of Atlantic trade explain Iberian divergence. In this paper, we build a new dataset which allows for a comparison of institutional quality over time. We consider the frequency and nature of parliamentary meetings, the frequency and intensity of extraordinary taxation and coin debasement, and real interest spreads for public debt. We find no evidence that the political institutions of Iberia were worse until at least the English Civil War.

Keywords: Economic Growth; Political Institutions; Political Economy; Parliaments; Little Divergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N13 N23 P14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 69 pages
Date: 2019-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/wp614.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/wp614.pdf [302 Found]--> https://fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/wp614.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:por:fepwps:614

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FEP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().