Mining, railways and local economic development

Why are some countries rich and others poor? This has been a key question in economics for centuries and one of the motivating questions of the subject. Many factors determining economic development have been described in the literature. This project will add to this debate by studying development in Styria, a region that experienced rapid growth in the 20th century. In the short period between the mid-19th and the mid-20th century, the state of Styria developed from an agricultural, remote and poor region to an industrial economic powerhouse. This research project will develop a new dataset of historic Styria to describe and quantify this process. A mid-19th century social survey conducted by Georg Goeth under Archduke Johann that gives a rich and disaggregated picture of the economic situation in this part of the world will be digitized. This dataset will be one of the earliest digitized economic censuses in the German speaking world. The project will study the role of the railway and of mining in this process, using the rich variation in both provided in this setting of 19th century Styria. While the economic literature has emphasized that both transport infrastructure and mining help economic development, it appears reasonable to believe that the presence of both leads to particularly successful industrialization. The setting of the economic development of Styria provides useful geographic variation that enables us to test this hypothesis. Insights on the complementarity between natural resources and transport infrastructure are expected to hold useful lessons for understanding economic development and economic growth more generally in todays world. Such findings could be an important contribution in the economic literature and in policy circles related to planning economic development. Furthermore, the historic documents that are planned to be digitize have not yet been studied economically, and thus the data digitization part of this project will provide new information that has not yet been studied in detail. The datasets and scans will be made public, and they may find much interdisciplinary, academic interest, from historians, political scientists or sociologists.