Illegal quays: Elizabethan customs reforms and suppression of the coastal trade of Christchurch,Hampshire

This article considers deficiencies in the designation and reassessment of Legal Quays (those authorized for foreign trade), and the detrimental impact of these and other Elizabethan customs reforms from the perspective of Christchurch, a small coastal town then in Hampshire. Throttling the flow of merchandise through such places drove trade, and consequently economic growth, to those other places that enjoyed a convenient Legal Quay. In places without such quays, regulation and the farming of customs caused (and also facilitated) the suppression not only of international trade but also of domestic maritime trade. Though otherwise encouraged by Crown policy, entrepreneurial endeavour in Christchurch was stifled by customs regulation, in particular by the logistical burden introduced with remote record‐keeping for coastal trade in the port books. The town seemed unable to break free of Southampton's controlling influence in order to realize its own apparent economic potential.     

中美贸易之开端——“中国皇后”号来华前后

1784年,美国＂中国皇后＂号商船来华,开启了中美贸易的新篇章。而在此之前,清政府已将南方四口通商变由广州一口通商,并由十三行来管理对外贸易。首航的成功开辟了中美贸易新纪元,对美国海外扩张及中国对外开放具有深远的意义。自此,中美贸易以激流勇进之势超越了荷兰、法国等欧洲国家,仅次于对华贸易有一百多年历史的英国。很多因素促成了这次伟大航行的成功,这不是个偶然事件,而是酝酿许久蓄势待发的东方之旅。     

Shift from Input‐based Growth to Productivity‐based Growth in Korean Manufacturing Industry

The Korean economy has entered a period of relatively sluggish growth after experiencing very dynamic and high economic growth since the 1970s. The recent growth rate has been around 3 percent, which is similar to that in many advanced countries. According to growth accounting, economic growth is possible because of input increases and productivity increases. Productivity growth is much more important than input increases for long‐term economic growth. We investigated whether there was a structural break in the Korean manufacturing industry and whether the main factor contributing to economic growth shifted from input to productivity. Using various econometric methods, we tested this question and found some interesting results. First, there was an important change in the 1990s, and the productivity trend seemed to show a big structural break at that time. Second, an input increase was the main factor contributing to economic growth before the break and productivity became more important after the break. Third, there was also a major change in the relationship between international trade and productivity.     

Productivity,Trade, and Institutional Quality: A Panel Analysis

Recognizing that gains historically attributed to trade capture instead the roles of institutions and geography, we estimate the relationship between labor productivity and trade for a panel of countries, 1980 to 2000. We use real and nominal openness as measures of trade. The endogeneity of trade and institutional quality is accounted for with instruments. Our trade instrument is based on a theoretically motivated gravity equation and uses a more comprehensive data set than in related studies. Fixed‐ and random‐effects and system‐GMM panel estimation methods address potential biases associated with cross‐section estimations. We find a robust relationship between real openness and labor productivity from the 1990s. Countries that trade more generate higher levels of productivity, supporting an institutional theory of growth. We find evidence that countries with low‐quality institutions benefit from openness to trade and that the positive effect of trade on labor productivity is lower for more populated countries.     

Did the 48‐hour week damage Britain's industrial competitiveness?1

Britain's 1919 introduction of a 48‐hour week for industrial workers has been highlighted as a key factor depressing its relative labour productivity. This largely ignores both any potential offset to lower hours from higher hourly productivity and the fact that the 48‐hour week was also introduced in almost all other industrialized nations (generally involving substantially greater reductions in hours). We examine the international context and the short‐term impact on British productivity, focusing on three major export industries—coal, cotton, and iron and steel. Britain did not suffer any significant relative productivity loss in these industries, while reduced working hours are shown to have been partially compensated for by higher hourly productivity.     

How dependent is the Chinese economy on exports and in what sense has its growth been export-led?

This paper studies the interaction between foreign trade and domestic demand and supply in China's economic transformation. It compares China's export dependency with other economies using input–output analysis. The paper also conducts econometric analysis of provincial level data to examine causality between the growth of foreign trade and components of domestic demand, and causality between the growth of foreign trade and total factor productivity. The main message is that China's export dependency is significantly lower than implied by the headline exports-to-GDP ratio. Moreover, the contribution of export to economic growth in China came mainly from its impact on total factor productivity growth from a supply perspective rather than its multiplier effect from a demand perspective. This relationship was found to be stronger in the more developed coastal areas than in the less developed inland areas.     

Does China Transfer Productivity Enhancing Technology to Sub‐Saharan Africa? Evidence from Manufacturing Firms*

Abstract: This paper considers whether trade between China and sub‐Saharan Africa results in productivity‐enhancing technology transfers to sub‐Saharan African manufacturing firms. As trade flows between countries potentially results in interactions that lead to technological improvements in the production of goods and services, we parameterize the level of total factor productivity for African manufacturing firms as a function of foreign direct investment flow, and for the country in which it operates, trade openness with China, and its interaction with foreign direct investment. With micro‐level data on manufacturing firms in five sub‐Saharan African countries, we estimate the parameters of firm‐level production functions between 1992 and 2004. Our parameter estimates reveal that across the firms and countries in our sample, there is no relationship between productivity‐enhancing foreign direct investment and trade with China. In addition, increasing trade openness with China has no effect on the growth rate of total factor productivity. To the extent that total factor productivity and its growth is a crucial determinant of economic growth and living standards in the long run, our results suggest that increasing trade openness with China is not a long‐run source of higher living standards for sub‐Saharan Africa.     

Mortality and voyage length in the middle passage revisited

Using a newly published database on the transatlantic slave trade prepared at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and a new methodology, this article reevaluates the relationship between slave mortality and the length of the middle passage on nine routes during the 18th and 19th centuries. For each route, interactive regressions are used to estimate the influence of factors such as crowding on-board, season of departure, and whether stopovers were made on a voyage. Death rates that track the average time pattern of deaths on the voyages of each route are calculated. These rates indicate whether deaths mainly occurred in the early part, middle section, or latter part of a voyage. Hence we are now closer to understanding whether deaths on individual routes largely resulted from preboarding or on-board conditions or an interaction between preboarding and on-board conditions. The relationships between mortality during three phases of the voyage, the coasting period, the middle passage, and the postarrival period, are also assessed as are the connections between slave and crew deaths.     

American colonial incomes, 1650–1774

New data now allow conjectures on the levels of real and nominal incomes in the 13 American colonies. New England was the poorest region, and the South was the richest. Colonial per capita incomes rose only very slowly if at all, for five reasons: productivity growth was slow; population in the low‐income (but subsistence‐plus) frontier grew much faster than that in the high‐income coastal settlements; child dependency rates were high and probably even rising; the terms of trade were extremely volatile, presumably suppressing investment in export sectors; and the terms of trade rose very slowly, if at all, in the North, although faster in the South. All of this checked the growth of colony‐wide per capita income after a seventeenth‐century boom. The American colonies led Great Britain in purchasing power per capita from 1700, and possibly from 1650, until 1774, even counting slaves in the population. That is, average purchasing power in America led Britain early, when Americans were British. The common view that American per capita income did not overtake that of Britain until the start of the twentieth century appears to be off the mark by two centuries or more.     

The coastal metropolitan corn trade in later seventeenth-century England

Exploiting hitherto unexamined London port book data, this article shows that during the last quarter of the seventeenth century the coastal metropolitan corn import trade was twice the size that historians relying on the work of Gras have assumed it to have been. More significantly, it demonstrates that Gras's failure to examine the capital's grain trade other than in terms of aggregate corn imports has disguised the nature and extent of its contribution to the development of the London economy. By the 1680s, the coastal trade comprised two distinct strands of roughly equal size: one providing food and drink for the London population, the other fuelling the overland trade of the capital. It is argued that the former was unnecessary for the provision of the city other than in barren years, but that the latter may have been indispensable for the development of the overland transport infrastructure of the metropolitan region at the height of the late seventeenth-century commercial revolution. Thanks largely to the agency of southern English mariners commanding large coasters, London's demand for fodder crops after the mid-1670s drew most of the coast stretching from Berwick to Whitehaven into the orbit of the metropolitan corn market.     

Do Inland Provinces Benefit from Coastal Foreign Direct Investment in China?

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in China is heavily concentrated in the coastal regions. Do inland provinces benefit from coastal FDI? We use a provincial‐level panel dataset and employ the fixed‐effects instrumental variables regression technique to investigate the interregional spillovers from coastal FDI to inland provinces. The study finds that, on average, coastal FDI has a negative impact on the economic growth of inland provinces. In addition, depending on the different trade activities engaged in (i.e. whether processing trade or ordinary trade), coastal FDI has different impacts on the economic growth of inland provinces.     

Real Effective Exchange Rate and Regional Economic Growth in China: Evidence from Provincial Data

Using data for the period 2000–2011, we construct province‐level real effective exchange rate (REER) indices for China and test the effect of REER depreciation on regional economic growth in a generalized method of moments regression framework. Our results show that REER depreciation, in general, promotes regional economic growth, through increasing net exports and lowering FDI costs. After dividing the full sample into coastal and inland subsamples, we find that REER depreciation influences economic growth in inland areas but not in coastal areas. This is due to the fact that the inland areas have more surplus labor or other resources to expand their production capacity when REER depreciation leads to increased world demand. Furthermore, compared to inland areas, processing‐and‐assembly trade comprises a larger share of trade in the coastal areas, where traders import more raw materials and intermediate goods to process and assemble goods. When the exchange rate depreciates, the costs of imported materials and immediate goods increase. In this case, the benefits from REER depreciation in coastal areas are offset to some extent and are thus lower than in inland areas.     

平鄂煤港打造国家级煤炭仓储交易基地的可行性研究

平鄂煤港是是中平能化集团实现煤炭大物流战略的重要平台,本文从平鄂煤港现状、战略背景分析、吞吐量预测、港口煤炭配仓储所采取举措等方面,对平鄂煤港打造国家级煤炭仓储交易基地可行性进行了阐述和研究。     

Reform of state‐owned enterprises and productivity growth in China

Using firm‐level data from a Chinese industrial survey covering 1999 to 2007, the paper analyses the impact of state‐owned enterprise (SOE) reforms on productivity growth in manufacturing. The results indicate that: (1) aggregate productivity of manufacturing increased rapidly, with an average annual growth rate of 10.6 per cent. Although the aggregate productivity of SOEs was lower than in other types of enterprises, their growth rate was the fastest. (2) The productivity growth due to SOE reform was mainly contributed by the improvements in resource allocation, rather than the growth of firm productivity. (3) The between‐firm effect and the impact of new firms contributed most to the total productivity growth, while the contribution from the exiting of firms was relatively small.     

Slave prices,the African slave trade,and productivity in the Caribbean, 1674–18071

We draw wide‐ranging implications about slave productivity change by making use of newly collected data on the prices paid for nearly 230,000 slaves as they arrived in the Americas from Africa between 1674 and 1807. Prices for the product that most slaves were destined to produce‐sugar‐are also available. Together the comprehensive series allow us to derive annual measures of average slave productivity and to compare productivity trends across different sectors of the Caribbean. Average productivity rose throughout the Caribbean, and the pattern of average productivity change across regions was similar, indicating an open slave market. These averages mask sharp differences in the growth of demand for slaves among regions, as reflected by their slave populations. Between 1700 and 1790 the increase in demand ranged from 90 per cent in Barbados to 600 per cent in Jamaica and Cuba; while total factor productivity overall may have doubled. The slave trade accommodated the rising demand. It also served to offset population attrition among the slaves.     

Dynamic Scoring in a Romer‐Style Economy

This article analyzes how changes in tax rates affect government revenue in a Romer‐style endogenous growth model. Lower tax rates on financial income (returns to physical capital and intellectual property) are partially self‐financing primarily because lower financial income taxes stimulate innovation and enhance labor productivity in the long run. In the baseline calibration, about half of a tax cut is self‐financing in the long run, substantially more than in the Ramsey model. The dynamics of the economy's response to a tax cut are very sluggish and, for some variables, nonmonotonic.     

Productivity Growth and Some of Its Determinants in the Deregulated U.S. Railroad Industry

This study analyzes the effects of an important postderegulation innovation on rail freight productivity: the elimination of cabooses and related crew members. It also analyzes the overall growth of productivity in rail freight between 1983 and 1997 (using a translog rail cost function estimated over a sample of Class I railroads between 1983 and 1997). The results indicate that elimination of cabooses and associated crew members from freight trains reduced costs by 5-8% on the typical Class I railroad in 1997, equivalent to an annual cost saving of $2 billion to $3.3 billion for all Class I railroads. Moreover, if Class I railroads had no other technological advances since 1983, their 1997 costs (with 1997 factor prices) would have been 36-43% higher than they in fact were. Finally, the results show that overall productivity growth in rail freight did not decelerate between 1983 and 1997; if anything, it accelerated slightly.     

基于DEA模型的工业行业全要素煤炭效率研究

运用DEA-BCC模型对我国工业行业的全要素煤炭效率进行测算,通过DEA-Malmquist指数对工业行业煤炭效率增长的原因进行分析,并使用聚类分析将全要素煤炭效率进行划分。结果表明：从2005年到2014年我国工业行业全要素煤炭效率不断提高,全要素煤炭生产率平均值为1.076,平均增长了7.6%,科技进步对其的贡献最大。不同的工业行业全要素煤炭生产率增长的原因是不一致的,因此要区别对待。同时全要素煤炭生产率低的行业多为耗能比较高、污染比较高的行业,全要素煤炭生产率高的行业多为耗能比较低、污染比较低的行业。     

Real Wages in Australia and Canada, 1870–1913: Globalization versus Productivity

Australia's and Canada's real wage experiences between 1870 and 1913 were distinctive. Faster productivity growth underpinned Canada's overtaking of Australia's wage levels. The globalization forces of migration and trade also shaped their comparative wages, principally by reducing wage growth in Canada. Immigration increased slightly Australia's real wages, but reduced wage levels in Canada, and tempered there the beneficial effects of rising productivity and improving terms of trade. In contrast, wage earners' share of national income rose after 1890 in Australia, with the productivity slowdown hitting chiefly rents and profits. Distributional shifts favouring wage earners in Australia, and the depressing effects of mass immigration on wages in Canada, limited Canada's wage lead before 1914, despite her faster productivity growth.     

香港FDI进入中国大陆的决定因素——基于省级面板数据的实证研究

进入中国大陆的FDI主要来自日本、美国、中国香港等国家和地区。进入中国大陆的香港FDI主要有港商投资、在港中资机构投资和“假外资”投资等三种类型。中国大陆东部沿海地区是香港FDI进入的优先区域，并向内地呈梯度分布。我们以1980—2008年的中国省级面板数据为基础，实证研究了香港FDI进入中国大陆的决定因素。本文结论显...