‘The bull is half the herd’: property rights and enclosures in England, 1750-1850

Common fields reduced the transaction costs for commoners’ cow keeping by lowering the cost of insemination. After enclosure, cow keeping fell among small owners who, unlike large farmers, could neither jointly own the bull and the cow nor lease the male easily. The minimum acreage required to restore cow keepers to their pre-enclosure economic position indicates that many commoners who were given some land at settlement were inadequately compensated for the change in property rights.     

Water and Chicago’s mortality transition, 1850-1925

Between 1850 and 1925, the crude death rate in the City of Chicago fell by 60 percent. We estimate that 30-50 percent of this reduction can be attributed water purification measures and the subsequent eradication of diarrheal diseases and typhoid fever and its sequella. Our findings are consistent with a proposition that early public-health scholars referred to as the Mills-Reincke phenomenon. According to advocates of the Mills-Reincke phenomenon, for every one death from typhoid fever that was prevented by water purification, there were three or more deaths from other causes (not usually considered waterborne) that were also prevented. At least part of this phenomenon appears to have driven by the fact that typhoid had a low case fatality rate but so weakened its survivors that they were vulnerable to later infections from tuberculosis and pneumonia. There is also evidence that typhoid survivors eventually developed kidney problems from which they later succumbed. These findings have implications for public health policies in developing countries.     

Papua New Guinea's tax performance, 1965-77

The PNG Goverment increased its tax ratio from 6.6 to 15% over the period, 1965–1977. Estimates of the buoyancy and the elasticity of the major taxes are also high compared to those obtained for other less developed countries. There are significant differences between the tax bouyancy and the tax elasticity to show that considerable efforts were made to collect more tax revenue through discretionary fiscal policies. However, a possible weakness exists in these discretionary policies, in that the collection of more revenue was brought about mainly by raising the tax rates of the existing major taxes and little attention was paid to the search for new tax bases.     

The nature of Japan's comparative advantage, 1965-80

This paper compares the dynamic factor proportions theory to the product cycle theory in explaining Japan's comparative advantage for the 1965-80 period. Three tests were used: (1) domestic Japanese relative prices of more and less competitive export commodities; (2) trends in capital-labour ratios, skill ratios, R&D intensity and product turnover for Japan's manufactured exports; (3) price elasticities over time of Japan's exports. The results suggest that: (1) the product cycle must be considered along with the factor proportions theory for the pre-oil shock period; (2) the product cycle theory is superior for the post-oil shock period.