The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

(^248) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
The significance of institutional and cultural impediments to develop­
ment shows well in the contrasting experience of Europe's periphery—
the lands around the edge, outside the core of industrialization in
western and central Europe; and, within this periphery, between those
countries and regions that learned to catch up and those that still lag.
Start in the north. Scandinavia, desperately poor in the eighteenth
century yet intellectually and politically rich, was late in learning the
ways of modern industry, but, once started, quick to pick them up. The
implications for wages and income show in the statistical estimates (see
Table 16.2).
This impressive performance owes everything to cultural prepara­
tion. The Scandinavian countries, equal partners in Europe's intellec­
tual and scientific community, enjoyed high levels of literacy and
offered a first-class education at higher levels.^21 They also operated in
an atmosphere of political stability and public order. Once among the
most warlike populations in Europe—one thinks of the Viking raiders
of the Middle Ages or of the imperial ambitions of seventeenth-century
Sweden—now they were the most peaceable, even stolid by compari­
son with peoples to the south. Property rights were secure; the peas­
antry was largely free; and life was a long stretch of somber hard work
broken intermittently by huge bouts of drinking and seasonal sun­
shine.
Table 16.2: Estimates of Real GNP per Capita in Groups of
European Countries, 1830-1913 (U.S.$ of 1960;
unweighted averages within each group)
1830 1860 1913
Industrial core 268 402 765
Scandinavia 219 297 682
Scandinavia without Finland 228 315 735
Rest of periphery 215 244 343
Industrial com-Austria (except 1830), France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Switzer­
land, U.K.
Scandinavia: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden
Rest of periphery: Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary (except 1860), Portugal, Romania, Spain,
Russia, Serbia. The 1830 figure refers to Portugal and Russia only
SOURCE: Pollard, "The Peripheral European Countries," as from Bairoch, "Main
Trends in National Economic Disparities."