News from the Monopoly Front: Changes in Industrial Concentration, 1992–1997

Comparing concentration ratios between 1992 and 1997 raises difficulties because the 1997 data are arranged according to a new industrial nomenclature. By comparing concentration ratios in industries where the definition did not change, it is possible to make comparisons of changes in concentration between the two years and to document the considerable changes in industrial structure in the manufacturing and retail sectors.     

Capitalism and freedom?

This essay tests Milton Friedman's conjecture that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. For the decade around 2000 indices of the degree of capitalism and the degree of political freedom are highly correlated and provide plausibility for Friedman's conjecture. In looking at changes over time in the nineteenth century, however, the analysis refutes Friedman's conjecture. These apparently contradictory results are reconciled by showing that both capitalism and freedom are related to such variables as the educational level of the population so that, although not causally tied, they are correlated in a cross-national comparison.     

Feudalism as an economic system

This review essay discusses recent books on feudalism by Perry Anderson, John Critchley, Rodney Hilton, and Witold Kula. Its purpose is to provide an overview to a number of approaches toward the economic aspects of feudalism and to indicate promising directions in this field for comparative economists. To this end, four major questions are discussed: What is feudalism? How and why did the feudal economic system emerge? What are the short-term economic mechanisms within a feudal economy? And how and why did the feudal economic system decline?     

An international perspective on land scattering

Statistical tests of a number of hypotheses concerning the degree of land scattering are carried out using a worldwide sample of 35 nations for the period around 1960. Such cross-national evidence provides some support for the proposition that scattering is brought about by production scheduling problems occurring with short growing seasons and the ensuing difficulties in obtaining nonfamily labor at critical periods without high transaction costs. Little support is obtained for other propositions linking scattering to risk, partible inheritance, striving for equality, or joint production. These empirical results have relevance for the debate about the economic forces underlying the West European common field system during the Middle Ages.