THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS AND SUPPLY‐SIDE ECONOMICS

The coalition has given the Liberal Democrats the opportunity to demonstrate their support for – or opposition to – supply‐side economics. The person who has done most on the supply side is Ed Davey, in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. In a remarkable legislative achievement for a Parliamentary Under Secretary in under two years in office, Davey ensured that the privatisation of Royal Mail reached the statute books, liberalised the terms and conditions for Post Office counters, and liberalised employment and retirement laws.     

SOCIAL SAVINGS

Abstract ‘Social savings’ is a cliometric concept to measure the benefit to society of technological improvements. The terms are defined, and the relationship between social savings and consumer surplus, total factor productivity and growth accounting measures is discussed. We critically outline Fogel's original application of social savings to American railroads in 1890, before looking at subsequent uses of the concept, both to other transport improvements and to other technological changes more generally. The paper concludes by setting out areas to which social savings could be applied, as well as setting out guidelines that future economic historians should use when applying the technique, in order to maximize the likely usefulness of any such work.     

Spatial patterns of development and the British housing market

The government wants 3m houses built by 2020. Economic theorytells us their locations matter for living standards. Economicscannot tell us the optimal locations, but does show that housesare usually socially more valuable in high land-price areas,because additional workers are more productive in such places.Land-price data and evidence on urban agglomeration economiespoint to a significant rise in the optimal sizes of some UKcities and that optimal locations have moved from industrial-revolutioncities towards the South-east. As a result, significantly expandingLondon, its commuter satellites, and other high-skill placesin the UK, but particularly in the South-east, is likely togenerate substantial rises in wages and living standards. Inthese places the planning system dramatically constrains theeconomy from responding with nineteenth-century dynamism, whennew economic opportunities led some towns to grow dramatically.     

Robert Millward. Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy Telecommunications and Transport, 1830-1990

Bob Millward is the right person to write a comparative volumeon the role of the state and the market in creating, developing,and maintaining network utilities in energy, transport, andcommunications in Europe. He has already done much work coveringa variety of aspects of this topic, and he understands the industriesand the political issues involved. This volume is halfway between a research monograph and a textbook.Though based largely on secondary sources, it is     

Gender,productivity, and the nature of work and pay: evidence from the late nineteenth‐century tobacco industry

Women have typically been paid less than men throughout history. We investigate earnings in Swedish cigar making around 1900. Strength was unimportant, yet the gender wage gap was large. Differences in characteristics, such as age and experience, and different jobs within firms, account for two‐thirds of the gap overall, and the entire gap for piece‐rate workers. Firms were as willing to employ women as men in the better‐paying piece‐rate section, and women were willing to take those jobs. In contrast, discrimination was extensive in the time‐rate section. Men in this section benefited from greater outside opportunities and customary wages elsewhere. Theory holds that labour market discrimination will reduce profitability, and make firm survival harder, a proposition that has never been tested historically. We find that cigar firms that feminized their workforces most extensively were most likely to survive. Product market competition prevented firms employing (overpaid) men to any great extent. We argue that economic historians must interpret industry‐specific gender wage differentials in the context of workers' outside opportunities, and in the context of product markets, which can—and in this case did—limit firms' room for manoeuvre.