Government decisions before and during the First World War and the living standards in Germany during a drastic natural experiment

The First World War hit Germany severely, particularly the agricultural sector, because the outbreak came unexpected and its duration exceeded all expectations. Many resources necessary for agricultural production were required by the war economy and led to shortages and shrinking supplies. Many agricultural laborers were drafted and the blockade imposed by the allies prevented Germany from a great deal of imports. As a consequence, the nutritional situation was devastating, particularly after 1916, and hit all groups of the German society.The period under observation provides one of most drastic natural experiments in the 20th century. This study uses anthropometric data from German soldiers who served in the Second World War to trace living standards between the 1900s and the 1920s. In contrast to other approaches, this paper is able to distinguish between social groups by occupation, religious denominatio\n, regional origin, and city size. The results suggest that although all social strata were hit by famine conditions, the height of farmers, urban citizens, Catholics, and especially individuals born in the highly integrated food-import regions along the coast and the banks of the Rhine declined most.     

Does Bank Affiliation Mitigate Liquidity Constraints? Evidence from Germany's Universal Banks in the Pre-World War I Period

This paper compares two similar samples of mining and steel corporations in pre-World War I Germany: one sample consists of corporations that were affiliated to one or more of the German “Universal Banks”, and the second sample consists of companies that had to rely on other sources of finance. Statistical analysis conducted in the framework of a linear fixed effects model indicates that the non-affiliated companies were liquidity constrained. The paper also sets out the corporate control structure as laid down in the trade law reform of 1884 and traces the origins of the current German dual board system, as well as the origins of several other aspects of the institutions that tied the German banking system to industrial concerns.     

Making profits in wartime: corporate profits,inequality, and GDP in Germany during the First World War1

Making profits in wartime: corporate profits, inequality, and GDP in Germany during the First World War. This article reconsiders, and rejects, Kocka's (1973) hypothesis that a strong income redistribution from workers to capital owners occurred in Germany during the First World War. A small number of firms profited from the war, but the majority experienced a decline in real income, similar to the decline in workers' real wages. This finding also has important implications for the political history of the Weimar Republic. The authors also use their figures to improve German GDP estimates for the war period, since their sample makes it possible to estimate private service sector development. Economic indicators were worse for the war year of 1917 than previously believed.     

Books and publications received

ABSTRACT

Economic theory predicts that regional wages will converge as transport and communication technologies bring labour markets together. An exploration of this transition from labour market segmentation to unification requires long-term evidence of nominal wages and cost of living by region. This paper presents new evidence of wages for male manufacturing workers and cost-of-living indices across 24 Swedish counties between 1860 and 2009. Our findings indicate that the Swedish regional wage differentials were a great deal larger in the 1860s than in the 2000s. Most of the compression took place between the 1860s and World War I, as well as in the 1930s and during World War II. Differences in expenditures on housing impact on our assessment of convergence in the post-World War II decades: the nominal measure declines, while the real one stays constant. Our concluding discussion engages with the assumption that before World War I, regional wage convergence was associated with labour mobility, spurred by improved communication and transportation technologies as well as by the implementation of modern employment contracts. In the 1930s and 1940s, in contrast, regional wage convergence can be traced to high unionisation and centralised collective bargaining in the labour market, two distinguishing features of the Swedish Model.     

Immigration quotas,World War I,and emigrant flows from the United States in the early 20th century

Little is known about international return migration because governments rarely track out-migrants. However, one exception occurred early in the 20th century when the United States kept records of emigrants. Using within-country changes in quota allocations in 1921, 1924, and 1929 in combination with 1908–1932 data on specific countries of intended destination of the emigrants, we estimate the effect of quotas on (1) out-migration rates, (2) emigration across skill groups, and (3) the duration of temporary migrants' stays in the U.S. Higher quota restrictions reduced emigration rates, mostly for unskilled laborers and farmers. Higher quota restrictions also increased duration of stay, as the share of migrants staying less than 5 years fell and the share staying 5 to 10 years rose. Return migration behavior was also associated with changes in previous immigrant cohort's networks and savings. Return migration rates were also low during World War I, and more significant population losses from the War in home countries discouraged return migration. Finally, out-migration of German migrants increased substantially during the 1920s.     

The Legacy of Black Lynching and Contemporary Segregation in the South

Wacquant (2001) and others have argued that social control efforts directed at racial and ethnic minorities frequently shift institutional form and become more nuanced as societies modernize, even as the underlying function persists. This study examines the connection between southern lynching and housing segregation. We argue that legal, political, social and demographic changes in the south made lynching dysfunctional as a means of control. Among other more nuanced control mechanisms, modern housing segregation helped serve as a replacement. We test this proposition by relating historical southern black lynching rates to recent levels of segregation in southern MSAs. We find that an MSA’s historical lynching rate is positively and significantly linked to the MSA’s current segregation levels after accounting for standard determinants of segregation. Thus, segregation does not just occur generally throughout the south, but follows a very particular pattern based on past lynching rates. Our findings add to a growing literature on the legacy of lynching, such as studies examining contemporaneous variation in support for and use of capital punishment.     

Population dynamics and economic growth in China

This paper focuses on two major elements of China's population dynamics—the rising proportion of workers in the population and the shift of rural workers from agriculture into industry and services—in a provincial-level analysis of per capita income and productivity growth during the last three decades. We measure the ‘mechanical’ contributions of these dynamics to per capita income as revealed by growth decompositions, before assessing the determinants of per capita income and productivity growth in a series of regressions that include the growth of the working-age to total population (WAP) ratio and a measure of sectoral employment change. Our results indicate that sectoral change has made a significant positive contribution to both per capita income growth and aggregate productivity growth, stemming from its positive impact on agricultural productivity growth—as predicted by the Lewisian dual economy model. However, the negative impact of sectoral change on productivity growth in the industrial and service sectors, combined with the negative impact of growth of the WAP ratio on both per capita income and aggregate productivity growth, suggests that the benefits of China's population dynamics during the last three decades have been overstated.     

Agricultural production and food consumption in China: A long-term projection

This paper uses a multi-country and multi-product partial equilibrium model to forecast food supply and demand in China and its impact on food trade in 2050. The model endogenises shifting consumption preferences due to China's demographic changes and real incomes growth caused by ongoing urbanisation and industrialisation. We show that total food demand in China is to increase by 33% by 2050 and its structure will shift towards more luxurious goods, away from necessities. While improved productivity growth will enable domestic production to rise, imports are still likely to play an important role in reducing the “quality” gap in future Chinese food demand.     

Selective Immigration and Ethnic Economic Achievement: Japanese Americans before World War II

This article examines the determinants of Japanese immigrant economic achievement in the continental United States before World War II. Japanese immigrants to the United States were a select group in terms of their occupational background and education relative to the Japanese population as a whole because of the restrictions imposed on Japanese immigration by both the Japanese and U.S. governments. Furthermore, the selective nature of Japanese immigration contributed to the economic achievement of Japanese Americans before World War II, when their occupational position underwent a dramatic improvement. This finding differs from the standard cultural explanation of ethnic economic achievement.     

Have Industrial Robots Improved Pollution Reduction? A Theoretical Approach and Empirical Analysis

To investigate whether industrial robots have improved the ecological environment, this study integrated the adoption of robot technology and pollution abatement into Melitz's heterogeneous firm model. This showed that using robots in production can lower firms' pollution intensity by increasing their abatement investments, and this reduction effect is greater for higher polluting firms and those subject to weaker local environmental regulations. These theoretical expectations were then confirmed through a series of empirical investigations based on Bartik instrument regressions, with multiple robustness checks as well as heterogeneity and mechanism analyses. This paper adds to the literature on the relationships between automation technologies and green transformation. It shows that in the pursuit of economic growth and environmental protection, it is necessary for policymakers to shift from pollution control to technical support for traditional manufacturing firms.     

Measuring employment discrimination through controlled experiments

Race/ethnic discrimination in hiring can be measured under controlled conditions using matched pairs of minority and nonminority research assistants posing as applicants for the same job. In 149 inperson job applications in the Washington, D.C., labor market, African American applicants were treated less favorab ly than equally qualified nonminorities more than one-fifth of the time. Employer behavior during these interactions suggest that, within continued public and private efforts against discrimination, particular attention should be accorded to the cognitive underpinnings of bias.     

Skilled immigrants and technology adoption: Evidence from the German settlements in the Russian empire

This paper examines knowledge spillovers across ethnic boundaries. Using the case of skilled German immigrants in the Russian Empire, we study technology adoption among Russian peasants. We find that distance to German settlements predicts the prevalence of heavy iron ploughs, fanning mills and wheat sowing among Russians, who traditionally ploughed with a light wooden ard and sowed rye. The main channel of technology adoption was German fairs. We show that heavy ploughs increased the labor productivity of Russian peasants. However, communication barriers precluded Russians from adopting skill-intensive occupations like blacksmithing, mechanics, carpentry, and other crafts. The results suggest that skilled immigrants may enhance local development through the introduction of advanced tools without transmitting their skills to a receiving society.     

Price movements in The Netherlands and Germany and the guilder-Dmark peg

Summary This article examines the long-run, relationship between Dutch and German consumer prices during the period 1961–1991. Two hypotheses are examined. The first deals with the ultimate objective of the guilder-Dmark peg and the second is whether Dutch and German prices are cointegrated. Accounting for an exogenous structural changes related to the estableshment of the EMS, the empirical evidence supports both hypotheses. Moreover, the analysis indicates that two-thirds of the reduction of the structural inflation rate in the Netherlands from 6.6% during the pre-EMS period to 3.0% afterwards can be attributed to the policy shift in 1979.     

‘Armament in depth’ or ‘armament in breadth’? German investment pattern and rearmament during the Nazi period1

Today, most scholars agree that Nazi Germany did not follow a premeditated Blitzkrieg strategy in the late 1930s and at the beginning of the Second World War. However, the question of the extent to which Germany's economy had been prepared for a longer war is still debated because statistical information on Germany's investment pattern is fragmentary and data on the structure of prewar German military expenditure are not available. Relying on newly discovered sources, this article closes these gaps. The Nazi regime clearly shifted its investment towards preparation for war from the mid‐1930s on, and though armaments purchases stagnated during the period from 1937 to 1939, investment in munitions industries grew considerably. Consequently, during the late 1930s the Nazis pursued a ‘sustainable’ rearmament strategy necessary for fighting a longer war. Yet, despite massive capacity enlargements in the munitions industries, total German investment was not unusually high by today's definition because contemporary figures included a significant amount of armaments purchases.     

Inflation expectations and the recovery from the Great Depression in Germany

A regime shift toward increased inflation expectations is credited with jump-starting the recovery from the Great Depression in the United States. What role did inflation expectations play in Germany that experienced a similarly successful economic upturn in the 1930s? We study inflation expectations in the German recovery across several methods: we conduct a narrative study of media sources; we estimate inflation expectations from a factor-augmented vector autoregression model, real interest rate forecasts, and quantitative news series. Consistently across these approaches, we do not find a shift to increased expected inflation. This recovery was different, and its causes lie elsewhere.     

An empirical analysis of Sri Lanka's Manufacturing Productivity slow-down

This paper analyses empirically the changes in Sri Lanka's manufacturing productivity during a period of regime shift from import substituting industrialisation to export-oriented industrialisation. We have used a varying coefficients stochastic production frontier model on a balanced panel data set to shed light on the effects of trade liberalisation on Total Factor Productivity which incorporates both changes in Technical Efficiency and Technical Progress. The results of the empirical validation of the stochastic production frontier model reveal that there were two distinct phases of output and productivity growth under each of the two trade liberalisation episodes that occurred during 1978–88 and 1988–97, respectively. The analysis carried out in this paper decomposing Total Factor Productivity into Technical Progress and Technical Efficiency also reveals that during early years of each episode, perspiration or factor inputs was the driving force of increased output growth giving way to ‘inspiration’ or technical progress as each phase matured. The stochastic production frontier empirics reported in this paper together with negative feedback effects emanating from the political turmoil and the prolonged ethnic conflict virtually brought the growth of foreign direct investment to a grinding halt in late 1980s, when the election of new right-wing government appears to have given a shot in the arm to overcome the paralysis of technical progress that seem to have contributed to the productivity slow-down in Sri Lanka's manufacturing sector in the eve of the new millennium.     

The Future of Multilateralism in the Post-pandemic World

This paper applies an endogenous institutionalist framework to understand the evolution of the rules-based international trading system since the end of World War II. We argue that the initial success of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and re-enforcement that led to the formation of the WTO can be explained by three major factors: the hegemonic position of the US, the belief that international trade would foster prosperity and peace, and Cold War politics. However, declining US hegemony along with a shift in global comparative advantage in labor-intensive manufacturing led to a shift from multilateral towards preferential trade agreements since the 1990s. Today, the WTO faces several new challenges, including increasing geo-political competition between the US and China, increasing digitization of commerce, and disrupted supply chains following COVID-19. A functioning WTO that facilitates global economic re-integration remains crucial to ensure a strong recovery from the pandemic and continued long-term prosperity and stability of the global economy.     

党在抗战时期民族区域自治政策的确立及意义

抗日战争时期,中国共产党基本确立了民族区域自治政策,这是中共在这一时期逐渐弱化民族自决、联邦制主张,不断强化统一国家结构、民族区域自治原则,民族纲领政策与时俱进、创新发展的最重要成果,是民族政策的独特创造和重大发展。     

产业赶超发展战略理论演进及其对中国产业发展的启示

国家实现产业赶超是“二战”后世界发展动态的一个重要经济现象,几乎所有国家都制定了自己的产业赶超发展战略。然而,日本、德国等战败国,韩国、新加坡等国以及中国台湾、香港地区成功地实现了产业赶超发展。而中国大陆、东欧和俄罗斯等大部分转型经济体和印度则通过FDI还未成功地实现产业赶超。如何解释这些国家和地区产业赶超的成功经验和失败教训,国际经济理论界发展了成熟的产业赶超发展战略理论。本文试图对这些产业赶超发展战略理论的演进进行总结归纳,并在此基础上得出若干结论性的启示和反思,以期对处于转型发展中的中国如何调整好产业赶超发展战略有所裨益。