The media is filled today with reference to the global economic village, political leaders talk in terms of world competitiveness, and Americans fear the loss of productivity and living standards. Economists have come to call this process convergence, and theory and empirical analysis on post World War II experience with it have flourished. It is often forgotten, however, that this process of economic convergence has a very long history. It starts in the 19th century following two important economic events; the discovery New World resources and the industrial revolution. Both of these events created economic divergence: wage, standard of living and per capita income gaps between members of the current OECD industrialized club increased sharply. After the 1850's, however, this divergence was followed by more than a century of convergence when poor countries grew faster than rich countries. What has been observed since the 1950s, therefore, has been going on since the middle of the last century. This process of convergence took place in fits and starts, and one major goal of this project is to identify which episodes underwent convergence and why. A second major objective is to uncover the forces which caused convergence. These would include international labor migrations, international capital flows, international trade, skill formation, and technological advance. War, policy intervention, and other events favoring or suppressing factor flows and trade are also likely to have played a central role in shaping those forces underlying the convergence. A better understanding of these historical forces should provide useful insights about the course of future world- wide economic growth.
