Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?

NBER Working Paper No. 12657

Issued in October 2006

NBER Program(s):Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, Development of the American Economy



We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and 1500 A.D. for the predecessors to today's nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today's national development outcomes. Although our strongest results are for 1500 A.D., we find that even technology as old as 1000 BC matters in some plausible specifications.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w12657

Published: Diego Comin & William Easterly & Erick Gong, 2010. "Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 BC?," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(3), pages 65-97, July. citation courtesy of

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