Jan Luiten van Zanden
Jan Luiten van Zanden has devoted his career to reconstruct the historical development of global inequality, and to find out why certain countries, such as The Netherlands, have been relatively successful, whereas others, for example Indonesia, lagged behind. He first of all focused on reconstructing the ‘facts’: how did welfare develop in the very long run in the various parts of the world economy. Part of this research went back to the Middle Ages, when the first foundations for Western prosperity were laid. Next, he aims to explain the long term trends in the world economy making use of recent theoretical insights into the drivers of development. In this recent work he stresses the role played by (female) agency in economic development (via, for example, the decisions taken by women about fertility and human capital formation) and of institutions which make it possible to share power and restrain the executive (for example in his – together with Maarten Prak - book on the Pioneers of Capitalism). He moreover plays a central role in the international research on global economic history, as former president of the International Economic History Association, and as organizer of Clio Infra, a large research project aimed to reconstruct the long-term evolution of global inequality. A spin off of this project was the OECD report How was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820, published in 2014, in which a historical perspective is added to the \’GDP and beyond’ debate. He recently also published about the long term history of biodiversity and the interactions between nature and society.
less
Uploads
Papers
evolution of economies. In the course of recent centuries, the exchange
of land, labour and capital by way of the market – whereby prices
are mainly determined by supply and demand – has become ever more
important. These exchanges increasingly replaced other systems of exchange and allocation, such as those by way of tribute, voluntary redistribution or systems applying some type of coercion, as in the manorial
system. This rise of what are termed ‘factor markets ’, occurring most
conspicuously in Western Europe, has had profound effects on economic
development. Most economic historians – whether from neo-classical,
neo-institutionalist or neo-Marxist schools – would agree that mobility of
factors of production, specialization and technological change are often
linked with, or promoted by, the rise of wage labour, land leases and
large-scale loans and investments, and the concomitant market competition.
The growth of factor markets is a not a unilinear process, however,
but one fraught with stagnation, crises and even the reversal of trends.
Moreover, the process displays striking regional differences.