Innovation and the Capitalist Revolution

Coen Teulings and Martijn Huysmans ()
Additional contact information
Coen Teulings: Utrecht University
Martijn Huysmans: Utrecht University

Chapter 3 in The Microeconomics of Market Failures and Institutions, 2025, pp 61-86 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The economic evolution in Western Europe and North America in the past 200 years is exceptional. Technological progress has always been very limited. That changed dramatically during this exceptional episode. As a consequence Western Europe and North America became very wealthy and global inequality exploded (the great divergence). Why did this happen there and at that time? We explore four factors: institutions, population density, agglomeration in cities, and human capital. The institutional factors were: the political control of the military, the rule of law for elites, enduring organizations, and looser kinship ties. The rule of law and the political control of the military allowed for a stronger commitment to not abuse violence than could be achieved by just relying on the condition for cooperation discussed in Chap. 1. Throughout history, cities played a pivotal role in transferring ideas, boosting human capital, and enabling innovation.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-74987-2_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031749872

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-74987-2_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().