The Face of Invention: Skills, Experience, and the Commitment to Patenting in Nineteenth-century Victoria

This paper uses patent data from Victoria to examine the roles played by skill and experience in Australian invention during the colonial era. In addition to identifying a broadening involvement of Australians in inventive activity in the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper also provides evidence which indicates that technological creativity in Australia in this period did not depend on either the existence of a body of highly skilled workers or major advances in the stock of knowledge of which only they were cognizant. Rather, common sense and the acquisition of basic practical skills appear to have been the only prerequisites for inventiveness. Given the widespread availability of such skills in the colonies, the article concludes that the supply of patentable ideas in nineteenth-century Australia must have been fairly elastic.     

Always egalitarian? Australian earnings inequality 1870–1910

We document the origins of Australia's egalitarianism by quantifying both the level and trends of earnings inequality during 1870–1910 by constructing social tables for earnings, thus overcoming the constraints imposed by the lack of income, tax and wealth data. We find that earnings inequality was much lower in Australia than in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1870 and that there was no rise in Australian earnings inequality over the half century 1870–1910, but rather a fall. We argue that such findings are driven by a faster skill supply growth relative to demand.     

Technological Development and Foreign Patenting: Evidence from 19th-Century Australia

Poor patenting performance is often taken as a sign of low inventiveness. This article explores this belief by looking at the case of 19th-century Victoria, where the level of foreign patenting consistently grew at a much faster rate than that of local patenting. By mapping movements in both foreign and Australian revealed technological advantage in Victoria in this period, this article demonstrates that this faster rate of foreign patenting was due not to the technological weaknesses of the Australian colonies, but rather to the nature and timing of their economic development.     

Victorian’s economy in the long run

Annual estimates of the GDP of Victoria for the period 1861–1976/77 are here presented and used as a basis for an analysis of Victoria’s long–run economic growth. Victoria is represented as having fallen behind the per capita GDP of Australia as a whole in the 1870s but to have out–paced the national growth rate from the early twentieth century until the late 1950s. The changing importance of natural resources and of the scope for manufacturing development are seen as the basis for an explanation of the Victorian divergence. The article carries the implication of a need for regional disaggregation in the analysis of Australian economic growth.     

发挥科技创新驱动 助力新旧动能转换

新旧动能转换是实现经济健康可持续发展的重要举措,而推动新旧动能转换,关键是科技创新,科技创新是推动新旧动能转换的长期动力。在解析科技创新驱动与新旧动能转换内涵和辩证关系的基础上,对科技创新驱动助力新旧动能转换的作用进行了分析,分别阐述了“四新”促“四化”、深化供给侧结构性改革、企业科技创新和人才强企对新旧动能转换的引领、激发、升级和支撑作用。旨在通过对科技创新驱动作用促进新旧动能转换的发展思路提供参考,从科技创新支撑角度提出合理的对策建议。     

我国发展循环经济的制度供给与政策取向

循环经济是我国21世纪环境保护的战略选择,是可持续发展的重要手段。但目前我国存在有效制度供给不足的问题,对循环经济的发展构成障碍。因此,必须建立新型的循环经济框架下的制度体系,即完善经济政策支持体系、法律保障制度、技术支撑体系,建立生产者责任延伸制度、环境影响评价制度等。     

Measurement of English farming technological change, 1523–1900

I have argued that for the period from 1661 to 1850, patent data in England were consistent in that no official changes in methods and standards of issuance occurred. Book data on titles published on farming production methods were similarly consistent from 1523 to the mid-19th century because the market for books developed gradually and the technology of printing was not substantially changed until the mid-19th century.My main point is that data on output of titles of books on farming productive techniques in England are useful measures of technological change. Books did have information on good production methods and could express productive ideas where a patent may not be issued. Further, the literacy rate of farmers was high so that books were likely an important source of ideas on farming production methods. Finally, the fluctuations in the book data were highly related to the fluctuations in the patent data, suggesting that a common set of factors caused those fluctuations. The high correlations between the detrended book and patent data indicate that if we accept patenting as a useful measure of technology we may also accept book title output of a technical nature as a good measure of technical change.I used the data for a simple analysis of the trend growth rate of agricultural technology in England from 1551 to 1850. While there is limited evidence to show that the subperiod 1651–1750 saw a slowing in the trend of development of farming technology, I argue that a division of the entire period into subperiods is too simplistic. A more fruitful approach would be an analysis of the underlying forces that determined the trend of development of the technology of English agriculture.The next step is an analysis of the forces that influenced technological development of English farming. From an economic point of view, market forces play an important role in influencing technology. Because such an analysis deserves careful consideration, I leave that to another paper (see Sullivan and Simon, 1983).     

Patenting in England,Scotland and Ireland during the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1852

There are two competing accounts for explaining Britain's technological transformation during the Industrial Revolution. One sees it as the inevitable outcome of a largely exogenous increase in the supply of new ideas and ways of thinking. The other sees it as a demand side response to economic incentives—that in Britain, it paid to invent the technology of the Industrial Revolution. However, this second interpretation relies on the assumption that inventors were sufficiently responsive to new commercial opportunities. This paper tests this assumption, using a new dataset of Scottish and Irish patents. It finds that the propensity of inventors to extend patent protection into Scotland and/or Ireland was indeed closely correlated with the relative market opportunity of the patented invention.     

Lancashire,India, and shifting competitive advantage in cotton textiles, 1700–1850: the neglected role of factor prices1

In the early eighteenth century, wages in Britain were more than four times as high as in India, the world's major exporter of cotton textiles. This induced the adoption of more capital‐intensive production methods in Britain and a faster rate of technological progress, so that competitive advantage had begun to shift in Britain's favour by the late eighteenth century. However, the completion of the process was delayed until after the Napoleonic Wars by increasing raw cotton costs, before supply adjusted to the major increase in demand for inputs.     

Baumol,Engel, and beyond: accounting for a century of structural transformation in Japan, 1885–1985†

This article examines the drivers of the long‐run structural transformation in Japan. It uses a dynamic input–output framework that decomposes the reallocation of the total output across sectors into two components: the demand side and the supply side, or technological change. To perform this task, we employ 13 seven‐sector input–output tables spanning 100 years (1885 to 1985). The results show that the demand‐side factors, as a combination of the Baumol and Engel effects, were the key explanatory factors in more than 60 per cent of the sector‐period cases in the pre‐Second World War period, while the supply‐side effect drove structural transformation in more than 75 per cent of such cases in the post‐Second World War period. Detailed decomposition results suggest that in most of the sectors, changes in private consumption were the dominant force behind the demand‐side explanations. The demand effect was found to be strongest in the commerce and services sector, which contributed to the rapid growth of GDP in Japan throughout the twentieth century.     

A LONG‐RUN VIEW OF THE UNIVERSITY GENDER GAP IN AUSTRALIA*

Australian universities were first established in the 1850s, well before the introduction of compulsory schooling. From the middle of the twentieth century, the introduction of mass secondary school education and the expansion of the number of universities widened student access to universities. Subjects offered in higher education increased in scope and labour market discrimination diminished. These factors, together with supply‐side changes, meant that women were more easily able to shift into investing in skills. By 1987, Australian women were more likely than men to be enrolled at a university. These aggregate figures, however, disguise considerable heterogeneity across fields of study.     

中国可持续发展实现途径的制度分析

可持续发展是中国21世纪经济发展的主题,运用经济发展成本与国内生产总值比较的方法对中国改革开放20年的经济发展进行评析来看,经济发展成本的相对数量有所下降,但绝对数量仍然有上升之势。为了提高经济发展的质量,实现可持续发展,在中国21世纪的经济发展过程中要加强制度供给:在基础性的制度供给方面,建立“经济发展成本内生的生态经济模式”,建立质量型低成本运行的国民经济体系和可持续发展的政策体系;在正式制度供给方面,要把建立中国的绿色经济制度作为出发点,解决制度缺位和提高制度的实施效果;在非正式制度供给方面,要提高环保意识,加强环保教育,更新生活观念,树立自然资本的观念。     

林业生态公共产品的层次性供给分析

文章运用现代经济学方法论中的成本效益分析和博弈论的思想指出了林区不同经济和社会发展状况影响着林业生态公共产品供给发展上的两种供给偏好和策略的选择,并循着上述思路较为系统地揭示了林业生态公共产品供给发展的内在矛盾难以进展的深层次原因,进而提出了解决矛盾的新思路：实施层次性的林业生态公共产品供给发展的模式类型和解决思路。     

Redistribution and Federal finance

A key issue of taxation policy since the 1980s is how governments can raise sufficient revenue for social protection and redistribution and to respond to the needs for public spending associated with rapid economic integration. A unique aspect of Australia's federal finance arrangements is horizontal equalization. This paper examines its origins in the federation debates and draws parallels between Australian economic history and the current experience of globalization. It assesses the impact and implications of the neoliberal transformation of the 1980s and 1990s on key institutions of Australian public finance, and suggests possible principles and solutions for tax policy in the twenty–first century.     

Local Government Debt,Factor Misallocation and Regional Economic Performance in China

This paper examines total factor efficiency and productivity performance by taking into account local government debt (LGD) in 31 Chinese provincial regions for the period 2000–2013. The results show that neglecting LGD may overstate economic performance in Chinese provinces. The eastern region shows better performance in single factor efficiency and total factor efficiency than the non‐eastern regions. The western region shows the worst total factor performance. The north‐eastern region is the only region that has experienced a decline in total factor performance. The state‐dominated, investment‐driven development model may help technological progress across Chinese regions but could lead to significant factor misallocation. We argue that biases towards more state‐dominated investment and land supply in less productive western, central and north‐eastern regions, at the expense of investment and land supply in more productive eastern regions, have contributed to the recent slowdown in economic growth in China. Therefore, further market‐oriented reforms in factor markets should be considered in the future.     

The State and the finance sector: the evolution of regulatory apparatus

This paper seeks to explain the motivation for the growth of regulation of the Australian financial sector and banking in particular. It will be argued that the pace and direction of the growth of the regulatory apparatus from the 1930s until the 1980s was set by concerns of governments about macro–economic issues rather than issues affecting the financial sector per se. The drivers of regulatory change over the last two decades of the century reflect new concerns about the efficiency and underlying stability of financial markets, and equity issues.     

INTEGRATING THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY GOLD RUSHES

In the century preceding World War I, the world experienced a series of gold rushes. The wealth derived from these was distributed widely because of reduced migration costs and low barriers to entry. While gold mining itself was generally unprofitable for diggers and mine owners, the increase in the world's gold supply stimulated global trade and investment. In this introductory article we integrate the histories of migration, trade, colonisation, and environmental history to identify endogenous factors that increased the world's gold supply and generated sustained economic growth in the regions that were affected by gold rushes.     

The changing relationship between inflation and the economic cycle in Italy: 1861–2012

The article investigates the relationship between GDP and prices in Italy in the long-run, from the country's Unification (1861) up to present day. By using the new national accounts data, over the period 1861–2012, we were able to make Italy the third country to have a historical test of the hybrid Phillips curve (in which both the new Keynesian and the backward-looking Phillips curves are tested), together with the UK and the US. How do economic growth and prices interact in Italy's different stages of economic growth? Unlike the US and the UK, where said interaction was already operating in mid-19th century, in Italy the link between inflation and the economic cycle emerged only after the First World War. We argue that this can be explained owing to Italy's different position in the international economic system and the way foreign conditioning factors (the exchange-rate regime and innovation in transportation) influenced the Italian industrialization. Before the First World War, deflation was imported. This turned out to be compatible with some GDP growth, insofar as the deflationist macroeconomic setting favoured capital inflows and technological upgrading. Whereas, from the First World War until the creation of a common European currency, price variations were mainly a consequence of national policies and domestic conditions: the trade-off with the GDP cycle is now manifest, both in the periods of deflation (the interwar years) and in those of inflation (the second half of the twentieth century). Our findings may also have important implications for present day, since price movements are once again, as in the liberal age, largely imported.     

Trade Policy in Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century

The paper provides an analytical comparison of the evolution of trade policy in Canada and Australia and of the two countries' roles in international trade diplomacy. Despite similarities in history and resource endowment, these roles have differed substantially, especially during the third quarter of the twentieth century. The focus is on the reasons why Canadian and Australian attitudes and policies differed so markedly. The importance of the USA as a trading partner, differing economic experiences during the decade of the 1920s, and the more concentrated composition of Australian exports all played a part. Once in train, the position that Australia was different and need not participate in GATT tariff cuts as long as agriculture was excluded became the inertial position, while Canada played an active role in GATT's early development. After 1973 Australia's position as an outlier among high-income countries' trade policies was reversed, and Australian and Canadian trade policies again became similar in the 1980s.     

China's industrial revolution: A new perspective

In “The Industrial Structure of Production: An Outline of a Research Program,” Ronald Coase and Ning Wang (2001) made a plea for a new economic research program that can go beyond the Arrow-Debreu framework and explain China's miraculous rise. They point out that the greatest trouble with the Arrow-Debreu framework lies in its inability to explain production. In this article I will push this insight further to shed new light on why and how production, or mass production in particular, emerged and mushroomed in the 18th–19th century England, the 19th–20th century United States, and 20th-21st century China but not in other parts of the world with similar geo-developmental conditions such as the Netherlands, Mexico, or India. My central thesis is that production or firms emerge in response to market demand, yet the so-called “market” is itself a fundamental public good that must be created by a development state instead of the “invisible hand.” Therefore, the lack of industrialization in any nation seems on the surface due to the lack of mass supply, but is in fact due to the lack of a mass market, which in turn is due to the lack of powerful and strong-willed market creators.