Karl Gunnar Persson was born in Borås, Sweden, then a textile industry centre, and was educated as an economic historian at Lund University.
[3] In the monograph Pre-Industrial Economic Growth[4] he showed that the traditional Malthusian model did not have a single equilibrium characterized by subsistence income, but in fact a number of equilibria.
If slow but persistent technological progress was admitted in a Malthus-Ricardo model, the equilibrium was characterized by positive population growth and income above subsistence.
Using the method with relevant controls indicates pre-industrial income growth since Medieval times of around 0.15–0.25 per cent per year.
He found that the quality and speed of information transmission determined the deviations from the ‘law of one price’ and that the introduction of the telegraph and the commercial press greatly reduced the deviations and increased the speed by which the ‘law of one price’ was restored after a shock in one market.
Instead it is theme and problem-oriented with separate chapters on the international monetary order, inequality, institutions and growth, knowledge transmission and convergence, globalization and so forth.
Persson challenged the conventional view in historical demography which tends to neglect within-marriage fertility control before the modern era.