The Conclusion reflects on the long-term trajectory of welfare in Europe, highlighting the substantial increases in living standards that have occurred over the past centuries. It considers how technological and institutional developments have enabled sustained economic growth, while also acknowledging the environmental and social challenges that have emerged, particularly in the context of climate change. The Epilogue discusses the potential for future crises, including economic and environmental shocks, and whether Europe’s economic system is resilient enough to manage these challenges. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of learning from historical experiences to address contemporary and future issues related to sustainability, inequality and economic development. By framing modern problems within the context of long-term economic history, the authors offer an optimistic yet cautious outlook on Europe’s ability to continue improving welfare in a sustainable manner.

Why do peat and peatlands matter in modern Russian history? The introduction highlights peatlands as a prominent feature of Russia’s physical environment and reflects on their forgotten role as providers of fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It discusses the invisibility of peat and peatlands in most existing historical narratives of the fossil fuel age and identifies peat as a lens to reflect upon Russia’s place within global histories of economic growth and associated resource-use. Situating the book at the intersection of modern Russian, energy, and environmental history, the introduction underscores why the planetary predicament makes the seemingly marginal history of peat extraction a topic of global significance.

Chapter 4 estimates the impact of another exogenous shock to incumbent capacity – changes in commodity prices. Brazil is one of the main producers of several commodities, such as coffee, bananas, oranges, and corn. Many municipal economies depend on rural agricultural production. Exploiting this diversified crop portfolio to build a municipal measure of changes in commodity prices, the chapter shows that commodity shocks have a strong impact on incumbency bias in rural municipalities. While negative commodity shocks deepen existing incumbency disadvantages, positive ones remove them. The results also indicate that commodity prices influence incumbency bias not by conditioning spending but through economic growth. This suggests that incumbency bias is partly driven by citizens’ informational limitations for discounting shocks. Brazilian mayoral elections demonstrate that offices with high policy scope but low capacity tend to experience an incumbency disadvantage, but that exogenous shocks to capacity can create heterogeneity in incumbency bias.

Chapter 6 pertains to the politics of regulatory redemption. Success in iPS research led to Japan’s regulatory reforms in 2013, which transformed the image of Japan’s regulation of regenerative medicine: from a cautious means of protecting patients and scientific quality, Japan’s regulation metamorphosed into a saviour of public health, an enabler of scientific achievements and clinical firsts, and a booster of the national economy. Exploring the performance of the regulatory reforms through the so-called All Japan System (the policy that symbolizes and champions these redemptive ideals), the Chapter illustrates how the political aims and ideas embodied in the new regulation support certain industries and sanctify particular clinical targets to gain a global competitive edge, as well as pursuing scientific, economic and public health goals. Prompted by competitive desire, these regulatory policies were designed to strengthen financial budgets, national economic growth and international competition, misrecognizing the structural alterations of Japan’s science community and the role of patients and their families who would have to co-finance it and play a role as experimental subjects.

This chapter examines the potential economic impact of investing in long-term care systems. Long-term care systems often indirectly burden informal caregivers, primarily women, leading to a significant loss of potential income and economic growth opportunities. Without adequately compensated, trained care professionals, it’s challenging for unpaid informal caregivers to increase their labour market participation. A comprehensive long-term care system must include support programs and policy changes that encourage both informal and formal caregivers to participate fully in the workforce, which is vital for economic growth and productivity.

Arguments that corruption is “grease for the wheels,” benefiting economic growth, are difficult to sustain. State-level findings show that extensive corruption tends to leave a state poorer, and more economically unequal, than states where the problem is less significant. Citizens’ ability to respond to those difficulties by political means is in turn influenced by corruption itself, general levels of political participation, the strength or weakness of trust in officials and fellow citizens, the amount and quality of political news coverage in the mass media, and a state’s social composition. Problems of low trust could conceivably be addressed via effective universally applied public policies, but those in turn can challenge, and be challenged by, key aspects of America’s long-term bargain between government and citizens and by citizens’ expectations of each other. Corruption often undermines trust, and trust can underwrite effective reforms, but the relationships are complex and contingent upon levels of trust that are neither too low nor too high.

Expo 70 in Osaka was a watershed, in the histories of post-war Japan and of exhibitions. Following the Tokyo Olympics, it substantiated Japan’s reemergence on the international stage of the Cold War world. In time, it also proved a turning point from the productionism of the immediate post-war years to the consumerism of the 1970s and 1980s. Most significant, it confirmed the Japanese state’s embrace of mega-events as a way of implementing the national planning regime, and thereby canalizing development. This chapter explores Expo 70 in detail, situating it in both the post-war reemergence of international exhibitions around the world and the benefits and costs of high economic growth in Japan. It shows how the Expo became a magnet, for intellectuals and creatives, both for and against, and for visitors, who flocked in greater numbers than for any expo before. It also explores in detail how the expo became a media event. Newspapers and TV attested to the implacable but manifold nature of development, which was evident in the ability of the Expo to conjure infrastructure and catalyse demand, even while it accommodated a fractured world, teeming crowds, and intransigent protest.

This chapter explains how the market process creates the right capital and technology to promote the process of development. It explains how an institutional environment of economic freedom best promotes the process of development and provides empirical evidence to support this view. It then reviews how economic freedom has evolved in countries that had sweatshops identified in the first edition of this book.

Chapter 6 studies East Asian economic growth and development strategy. It starts with a section on how economic growth and the theory of growth have been constructed. It then discusses the East Asian economic miracle – rapid growth in GDP per capita with relative equity. Most East Asian countries have chosen a hybrid path, often emulating each other and building on recent successes. Most adopted the developmental-state strategy to different degrees and at different points, and they generally view modernization as a way to regain their past glories. This chapter focuses on material wealth production, with a particular emphasis on how East Asian nations adapt and innovate. It also discusses the consequences of East Asian growth in terms of the rise and fall of nations, the “rich nation, strong army”, the contest of political systems, and the environment. Uneven economic growth is a source of a shifting balance of power.