A NOTE ON BANTU EDUCATION, 1953 TO 1970

In 1954 Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the main architects of the apartheid system, said that blacks ought not to be trained above certain "forms of labour". These words, often quoted out of context, are commonly interpreted as based on a view of black inferiority and as designed to keep blacks in a position of servitude. This note argues that other considerations should also be taken into account, including the need for providing appropriate labour on a mass basis in an industrialising society and for establishing control over urbanised black youths.     

WELFARE, ENTERPRISE, AND ABORIGINAL COMMUNITY: THE CASE OF THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN KIMBERLEY REGION, 1968–96

This article traces the development of Aboriginal-controlled businesses and their ability to access land, labour, and finance in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It investigates the influence of the development policies on Aboriginal commercial operations. Among other things, the implementation of a new policy – beginning in the early 1970s – saw the handing over by the state of large tracts of land, and the provision of labour and finance to Aboriginal interests. The article analyses the tension between land and enterprise as a welfare measure and as a means of commercial endeavour.     

MEASURING INEQUALITY TRENDS IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIA USING FACTOR–PRICE RATIOS: THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARIES

Previous research on nineteenth century globalisation argues that during the second half of that century wage–rental ratios in labour scarce, land-abundant new world economies decreased. This suggests inequality rose in the new world. Australia has been cited as a conspicuous example of this trend. The paper re-examines this argument using disaggregated land and wage data for four Australian colonies. We reveal large regional differences in both factor–price levels and trends – something that has been overlooked when discussing Australian colonial inequality and we suggest that regional disparities in other nineteenth century economies are also likely to be important.     

FORECASTING RECESSION IN SOUTH AFRICA: A COMPARISON OF THE YIELD CURVE AND OTHER ECONOMIC INDICATORS

The paper uses the standard probit model proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1996) , as well as the modified probit model suggested by Dueker (1997) , to examine the ability of the yield curve to predict recessions in South Africa, and compares its predictive power with other commonly used variables such as the growth rate of real money supply, changes in stock prices and the index of leading economic indicators. Compared with other indicators, real M3 growth does not provide much information about future recessions, whilst movements in the All‐Share index provide information for up to 12 months but do not do better than the yield curve. The index of leading economic indicators outperforms the yield spread in the short run up to 4 months but the yield spread performs better at longer horizons.     

BANKING RECORDS,BUSINESS AND NETWORKS IN COLONIAL SYDNEY, 1817–24

Examining accounting transactions between depositors in the first accounts ledger of the Bank of New South Wales contributes to our knowledge of early Australian colonial businesspeople and their business activities. A social network analysis framework is applied to the transactions to disclose business networks and prominent individuals in the networks. The analysis seeks to ascertain the importance of these people to commerce and the significance of their networks in facilitating commercial relationships in a business environment fraught with uncertainty. The results illustrate the importance of networks to colonial trade and mercantile activity, especially for smaller scale businesspeople.     

Laying the Victorians to Rest: Funerals,Memorials, and the Funeral Business in Nineteenth‐Century Otago

This article seeks to integrate the history of the physical aspects of burial practices with the cultural aspects of mourning and bereavement by considering the businesses that catered for the demand created by funerals and mourning in the second half of the nineteenth century. The example of the first major industrial and commercial urban centre to develop in New Zealand, Dunedin, is used to show that a range of businesses emerge quickly to cater for the funerary trade. Many were short lived, and few specialised exclusively in the funerary business.     

MAKING SENSE OF THE ‘BUSINESS GROUP’ IN MODERN CHINA: THE RONG BROTHERS' BUSINESSES, 1901–37

Some China scholars have suggested that ‘business groups’ in pre‐Communist China adopted a ‘hierarchical’ structure of management. This perception is re‐examined in a study of the inter‐firm relationship among the firms in which the Rong brothers, prominent industrialists of the 1910–30s, invested. We find that equity control, marketing, purchasing, and financing of these firms show a high degree of individuality among the firms, while the Headquarters Company functioned as their coordinator. It suggests that the hierarchical‐controlled ‘business group’ structure in pre‐war China is either a phantom creation of historians or the projected image of later generations who created it during the nationalisation of firms in the 1950s.     

‘FORGING,AHEAD’: INDUSTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION IN A MELBOURNE SUBURB 1906–85

The trajectory of the suburb Sunshine in Western Melbourne (1906–85), from industrial powerhouse to repository of social problems, sheds light on the issues surrounding organic urban expansion. For the many Australians living on the fringes of large cities, a sense of deprivation – particularly inequality in services – undercut the presumed comfort and stability of the post‐war period. Unrest in outer areas deepened following the contraction of the ‘long boom’. The area's pre‐Second World War origins as a manufacturing suburb regulated by the industrialist Hugh V. McKay is starkly contrasted with its later incarnation as a site of industrial and suburban sprawl.     

THE ROLE OF THE HIGH COURT IN FEDERAL ARBITRATION DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION: PRESERVING A FUTURE FOR ‘REASON AND MORAL SUASION’?

Between 1929 and 1933 the Australian federal system of conciliation and arbitration came under economic and political strain. This article reveals that arbitration proved to be an adaptable industrial relations framework for dealing with economic depression. While the monetary entitlements of workers were reduced, the legal instrumentality that conferred the wage cuts, the Arbitration Court, itself defied abolition and evolved to be a protective body. There was a subtle and previously unremarked interaction in the regulatory functions of the High Court, the Arbitration Court, and the Commonwealth Parliament characterised by the purposeful abstention of the High Court and Scullin Government and the activism of the Arbitration Court.     

STATE-LEVEL BASIC WAGES IN AUSTRALIA DURING THE DEPRESSION, 1929–35: INSTITUTIONS AND POLITICS OVER MARKETS

State wage-fixation tribunals developed quite particular patterns of basic wage fixation during the Depression. They declined to follow the Commonwealth Court's 10 per cent wage cut, thereby confining its effect to about half the workforce and creating distinctly different State and Commonwealth basic wage patterns in each capital city. Further, tribunals' uneven patterns of basic wage adjustment to deflation meant that in some states, the real State basic wage increased. Patterns of state institutional behaviour and state politics therefore help explain the stickiness of real average wage levels during the Depression.     

TARIFFS,SUBSIDIES, AND PROFITS: A RE‐ASSESSMENT OF STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN AUSTRALIA 1901–39

We re‐interpret the drivers of structural change in Australia from Federation to World War II. Manufacturing increased its relative share of output and employment, the farm sector and mining contracted. Conventional wisdom contends these shifts largely resulted from government policy, particularly increases in trade barriers. We contend that the connection between tariffs and increased profitability is conceptually weak and not supported by extant evidence. We argue that exogenous shifts in consumer preferences, the adoption of new technologies, changing factor proportions, and greater specialisation in manufacturing and services were responsible for manufacturing increasing its share of the economy's resources and output.     

THE SUPPLY OF ECONOMIC HISTORY IN AUSTRALASIA: THE AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW AT 50

In 2010, the Australian Economic History Review published its 50th volume. To mark the occasion, we present a quantitative analysis of the output of economic and business history that has appeared in its pages since 1956, and review the development of the discipline through its journal editors. Content was until recently overwhelmingly focused on Australia and New Zealand economic and business history, despite the efforts of past editors to attract more scholarship on the wider Asia‐Pacific region. Articles on Asia and the rest of the world have become more common since the late 1990s.     

RAINFALL, THE MÉLINE TARIFF, AND WHEAT PRODUCTION IN MEDITERRANEAN FRANCE, 1885–1914

Wheat production stagnated in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while cultivated acreage and wheat output declined sharply around the Mediterranean from the 1870s. Wheat output never recovered in this region despite the introduction in 1885 of tariff measures, such as the 1892 Méline Tariff. This paper analyses the response of Mediterranean wheat growers to changes in local rainfall and to variations of the duty on imported grains. It uses regional level data for nine administrative divisions located on or near the Mediterranean and assesses the impact of rainfall on yields. It argues that an interplay of protectionist policies and environmental conditions explain the decline of wheat production.     

LABOUR AND LAND IN GHANA, 1874–1939: A SHIFTING RATIO AND AN INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION

The Second Industrial Revolution created markets for new products for Ghana, rubber and then cocoa beans. Mechanised transport spurred the spread of cocoa planting. The paper estimates the resultant shift in factor ratios, and synthesises the data for prices of land-use rights and wages as the economy moved from land abundance to localised land scarcity. The consequences for factor markets were institutional rather than simply quantitative. For the first time markets in land use rights became widespread, while hired labour and farm pledging replaced slavery and debt bondage, as cocoa income made it possible for farmers to offer labourers sufficient inducement to enter the labour market.     

Long‐Run Trends in Australian Executive Remuneration: BHP, 1887–2012

Outside the United States, little is known of long‐run trends in executive compensation. We fill this gap by studying BHP Billiton, a resources giant that has long been one of the largest companies on the Australian stock market. From 1887 to 2012, trends in CEO and director remuneration (relative to average earnings) follow a U‐shape. This matches the pattern for US executive compensation, Australian top incomes, and (for the past two decades) average trends in executive compensation in top Australian firms. Like the United States, Australia experienced a post‐war ‘great compression’ prior to the recent ‘great divergence’.     

COLONIALISM AND LONG‐RUN GROWTH IN AUSTRALIA: AN EXAMINATION OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN VICTORIA'S WATER SECTOR DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Institutional change in water rights in the nineteenth century Australian colony of Victoria raised institutional efficiency, which contributed to long‐run economic growth. High‐quality human capital and the extension of voting rights (franchise) were crucial for efficient institutional change in the water sector. Quality human capital (literacy) appeared to increase the rural population's awareness of the economic impact of the existing structure of water rights that may have constrained growth in the agricultural sector and reduced investment incentives. Extension of the franchise allowed the rural population to exert political pressure for enactment of change in water rights, which resulted in efficiency‐enhancing policies and efficient institutions. The findings show these two factors were more important than Victoria's British colonial heritage in determining whether growth‐enhancing institutional change took place.     

CURRENCY CRISES IN EMERGING MARKETS: THE CASE OF POST‐LIBERALIZATION TURKEY

This article investigates the determinants of currency crises in Turkey. It analyzes the two major currency crises of 1994 and 2000–2001 in the light of the existing theoretical models. The present study uses logit, probit, and limited dependent models to explain the currency crises in the post–capital account liberalization era. The results obtained from the three approaches are generally consistent and the coefficients obtained for the explanatory variables generally have the same sign. The findings suggest that the currency crises in Turkey are associated with global liquidity conditions, fiscal imbalances, capital outflows, and banking sector weaknesses.     

FROM MANUFACTURING ZONE TO LIFESTYLE PRECINCT: ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN INNER MELBOURNE, 1971–2001

Deindustrialisation, decline in manufacturing employment, gentrification, and the regeneration of inner urban areas characterized the experiences of many Western cities during the late twentieth century. In North America and Europe, economic and urban historians have studied these profound changes, but not so in Australia. This paper charts the decline of manufacturing in Melbourne's inner suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s and its replacement by, firstly, small-scale manufacturers catering to local niche markets, and later by ‘warehouse-style’ residential development.     

THE EFFECT OF ACCESS TO IMPROVED WATER SOURCES AND SANITATION ON ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY: THE CASE OF SUB‐SAHARAN AFRICAN COUNTRIES

This paper evaluates the effect of access to improved water sources and sanitation on 41 sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries' economic efficiency and growth. For this reason data envelopment analysis (DEA), bootstrap techniques and probabilistic approaches are used. The empirical results indicate that SSA countries' economic efficiency is positively influenced by the access of population both on improved water sources and sanitation. Finally, when the provision of access to improved water sources is provided to more than 50% of the population, the positive effect on countries' economic efficiency is much greater compared with the effect of providing sustainable access to improved sanitation to the same proportion of population.     

THE 200 KM CITY: BRISBANE,THE GOLD COAST,AND SUNSHINE COAST

Since the 1970s, several Southeast Queensland coastal towns in areas marketed as the ‘Gold Coast’ and the ‘Sunshine Coast’ have merged with each other and joined with Brisbane to become one of the world's longest urban coastal strips. The population of this 200 km long city is fast approaching three million. This urban pattern reflects the preferences of many Australians about where and in what type of housing they would like to live. The unplanned nature of this growth raises several policy challenges relating to resource use and traffic congestion.