AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL AND SOUTH-EAST ASIAN TIN MINING, 1906–40

This article examines the role of Australian capitalists in developing the tin dredging industry in South-East Asia. The capital intensive nature of the industry required substantial preparatory investment in prospecting, and the formation of many different kinds of alliances. The group that played the major role in demonstrating the viability of tin dredging was unable to make the transition to the mature stage of the industry. While others were more successful, most felt their properties were best administered by an English group. The dominant role played at the beginning of the century became quite marginal by the outbreak of World War II.     

HECKSHER-OHLIN IN CANADA: NEW ESTIMATES OF REGIONAL WAGES AND LAND PRICES

Many immigrant-receiving and land-abundant countries experienced a diminishing ratio of wages to land prices during the globalisation era from 1870 to 1910. Factor price evidence suggests that Canada does not fit the pattern. We present the first Canadian estimates of region-specific wages and land prices that span the period from 1871 to 1925. Our evidence indicates that while Canada as a nation looks like an anomaly in the era of convergence, this is largely an artefact of aggregating the experience of the labour-abundant eastern provinces with the late-settling and land-abundant western provinces.     

MAKING THE COLONIAL STATE: DEVELOPMENT,DEBT, AND WARFARE IN NEW ZEALAND, 1853–76

Warfare in New Zealand during the 1860s has recently been linked to the rise of the central state and growth of the national debt in that colony. This article argues that any parallel to the growth of the European fiscal‐military state is misguided. The fundamental cause of state centralisation and rising indebtedness was the same long‐run dynamic of colonial development active in all settler societies during the nineteenth century. The colonial state functioned, in part, to raise capital for development, and if necessary the colonial state would be remodelled in order to achieve this. New Zealand was no exception.     

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.     

FACTOR PRICES AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN LESS INDUSTRIALISED ECONOMIES 1870–1939

Global trade expansion after 1870 had potentially powerful effects on income distribution, especially in land-abundant less industrialised economies, by increasing land prices relative to wages. The papers in this issue add evidence on wage–rentals for a range of countries, specifically Australia, Canada, Ghana, India, and Sweden. These new data offer partial support for Jeffrey Williamson's view that the distributional effects of booming global trade to 1914 were powerful and ubiquitous, but they highlight that more attention might be given to geographical boundaries and to other distribution forces including technology and wage bargaining conditions.     

BASKET PEGS AND EXCHANGE RATE REGIME CHANGE: AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND IN THE MID‐SEVENTIES*

The adoption of a basket peg by China in July 2005 raised interest in this form of exchange rate regime. This paper explores the emergence of the basket peg in the early 1970s, using New Zealand and Australia as case studies to examine why it was adopted, how it operated, and their policy‐makers' use of it to influence various goals. We highlight the complexity of regime choice following the collapse of Bretton Woods. For Australia and New Zealand, the basket peg was a plausible (although interim) solution when they were reluctant either to peg to a single currency or float.     

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.     

THE NEW ZEALAND PRESS ASSOCIATION 1880–2006: THE RISE AND FALL OF A CO-OPERATIVE MODEL FOR NEWS GATHERING

The establishment of New Zealand's press agency, the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA), as a co-operative news gathering agency in 1880 has traditionally been regarded as reflecting a pioneering spirit of newspaper unity or as being largely determined by the political situation of the time. But these explanations are insufficient. Applying economic and organisational theories of co-operatives to the history of NZPA, this paper reveals it was market conditions that led to the creation of NZPA as a co-operative news gathering service. Following profound changes in those market conditions, NZPA recently abandoned this co-operative news gathering model.     

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.     

COMMENTS ON FACTOR PRICES AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN LESS INDUSTRIALISED ECONOMIES, 1870–1939: REFOCUSING ON THE FRONTIER

A great deal of the current research into nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalisation has been focused through a neoclassical trade theory lens. Applying the Stopler-Samuelson paradigm from Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory, the result is an approach that sees price convergence as pivotal in defining, identifying, and measuring globalisation. This focus, however, obscures the implications of frontier incorporation and other insights achieved by viewing nineteenth-century globalisation as a mechanism whereby peripheral economies were incorporated into the core of organised economic activity. A frontier-centred perspective also reintroduces the role of economic institutions as a crucial element of economic growth and development.     

SHORT‐RUN AND LONG‐RUN DETERMINANTS OF THE REAL EXCHANGE RATE IN MEXICO

This paper explores the real exchange rate behavior in Mexico from 1960 until 2005. Since the empirical analysis reveals that the real exchange rate is not mean reverting, we propose that economic fundamental variables affect its evolution in the long run. Therefore, based on equilibrium exchange rate paradigms, we propose a simple model of real exchange rate determination, which includes the relative GDP per capita, the real interest rates, and the net foreign assets over a long period of time. Our analysis also considers the dynamic adjustment in response to shocks through impulse response functions derived from the multivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) model.     

AN ECONOMY ILL-SUITED TO YOUNGER WORKERS: CHILD AND YOUTH WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION IN COLONIAL QUEENSLAND, 1886–1901

This article explores the extent and significance of child and youth work in late 19th century Australia. It demonstrates that, while demographic changes meant that almost half the population was aged 19 years or less, this age cohort never comprised more than 18 per cent of the recorded workforce. It is argued that this under-representation reflects the fact that children and youths were ill-suited to the work demands of most colonial occupations. They did not threaten the position of adult males in the key areas of the economy such as construction, heavy engineering, pastoral work, mining and transport.     

EFFECTS OF IMPROVING INFRASTRUCTURE QUALITY ON BUSINESS COSTS: EVIDENCE FROM FIRM‐LEVEL DATA IN EASTERN EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA

Public infrastructure is one of the important determinants of economic growth. Not only access to but also quality of infrastructure affects firm productivity as well as people's livelihood. Frequent interruptions of the infrastructure‐service supply impose extra backup costs on enterprises, hinder their timely business activities, and result in large losses of sales opportunities. This paper focuses on the impacts of improving the quality of public utilities (electricity, water supply, and telecommunications), using firm‐level data from 26 transition economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The results suggest that firm costs would significantly increase when electricity outages occur frequently and the outage duration becomes longer. Similarly, when more time is required to restore suspended water supply, firms' competitiveness would be weakened. Not surprisingly, the impacts tend to vary depending on industry. The construction, manufacturing, and hotel and restaurant sectors are found particularly vulnerable.     

'THE LAW OF STORMS': EUROPEAN AND INDIGENOUS RESPONSES TO NATURAL DISASTERS IN COLONIAL INDIA, c. 1800–1850

Focusing on collective response to storms and floods in early colonial India, the paper explores obstacles to successful disaster response with one example related to meteorology of cyclones and the other the use of embankments. In both these examples, there was an attempt to build public-private partnerships, which succeeded in the case of weather prediction and failed in river embankment. The failure is explained by two factors. Coordination and contracting were costly when the private partners had variable capacities and interests. Furthermore, whereas meteorology predicted nature, embankments interfered with nature, an intervention which carried social and economic costs.     

SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS AND NETWORKS IN THE CASE OF SEMICONDUCTOR LASER TECHNOLOGY IN THE US AND JAPAN, 1960s–2000s

United States organisations took a clear lead in semiconductor laser research until the mid‐1970s. After the 1980s, many important breakthroughs were developed by Japanese organisations. Exploring the journal Applied Physics Letters, this study examines how semiconductor laser technology developed in these two countries and how this change in the country‐level industrial leadership in the scientific research occurred. Examining the relationship among industrial organisations, research networks, and scientific breakthroughs, it discusses how these coevolved and how breakthroughs were channelled in different directions. R&D targets were channelled into small markets in the US, but were concentrated into the same markets in Japan.     

INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF INTRAHOUSEHOLD RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION IN RURAL ANDHRA PRADESH,INDIA

In this special issue, we use unique household data which was collected exclusively for our study in Andhra Pradesh, India, with the help of an NGO. We estimate and test the intrahousehold resource allocation rules, incidence of child labor, and the effects of credit constraints on time allocation among household members. Three empirical papers of this issue indicate the overall support for the collective model against the unitary model of households, clarified the role of household structure, and show the nature of mother‐child labor substitution under a binding credit constraint. In addition, a survey paper discussing the recent trends on educational attainment and the empirical strategies in identifyng the policy effects are included.