Bennet Woodcroft and the value of English patents, 1617–1841

We examine the potentialities of a new indicator measuring the value of English patents in the period 1617–1841. The indicator is based on the relative visibility of each individual patent in the contemporary technical and legal literature as summarized in Bennet Woodcroft's Reference Index of Patents of Invention. We conclude that the indicator provides a reasonable proxy for the value of patents and that it can be usefully employed to shed light on the timing and scope of innovation during the Industrial Revolution. In particular, our indicator offers a suitable reconciliation between the patent records evidence and the Crafts–Harley view of the Industrial Revolution.     

Prizes,patents and the search for longitude

The 1714 Longitude Act created the Board of Longitude to administer a large monetary prize and progress payments for the precise determination of a ship's longitude. However, the prize did not prohibit patenting. We use a new dataset of marine chronometer inventors to show that the propensity to patent was high. We argue that while the prize spurred entry by key inventors, and progress payments facilitated research investment in an area of significant social value, patents promoted disclosure. Our findings highlight the importance of complementarities between prize and patent-based incentives in the design of innovation inducement contests.     

The utility of a common coinage: Currency unions and the integration of money markets in late Medieval Central Europe

This paper employs a new method and dataset to estimate the effect of currency unions on the integration of financial markets in late Medieval Central Europe. The analysis reveals that membership in a union was significantly correlated with well-integrated markets. We also examine whether currency unions were endogenous. Our results indicate that where unions were established, markets had been significantly better integrated already in the preceding period. In addition, we show that currency unions created by autonomous merchant towns were better integrated than unions implemented by territorial rulers. The overall implication is that monetary diversity was a corollary of weakly integrated markets in late Medieval Central Europe.     

Trade Unions in Local and Regional Development and Governance: The Northern Trades Union Congress in North East England

From a position of relative isolation, trade unions have become increasingly important agents in local and regional development and governance in the UK since the election of the New Labour government in 1997. Analysis of the experience of the Northern Trades Union Congress (NTUC) suggests that devolution and regionalisation are exerting increasing pressures upon trade union federations to adopt a multi-level approach to organisation across a range of scales—local, sub-regional, regional, sub-national, national and international—to connect with the evolving multi-layered governance structures of the UK political economy. Strategic multi-level organisation suggests the decentralisation of power, authority and resources within the labour movement—challenging the national and centralised legacy of its collective bargaining history—and a division of labour and set of priorities at the different scales to build the links between local and regional engagement and trade union renewal.     

Profitability and factory-based cotton gin production in the antebellum south

Before 1820 Northern mechanics started factory-based cotton gin manufacturing to compete with traditional Southern “ginwrights.” Later, cotton gin production in factories was transferred to the South. This paper estimates the profitability of cotton gin makers in the antebellum industrial census. The Southern sector was more profitable than that of the North, explaining the regional migration of machine production resources. Besides transport cost protection, Southern firms had a cost advantage in sales and service networks. Specific factor investments in gin making limited further resource flows from North to South after 1840. It also reduced the industry’s impact on Southern economic development.     

新疆商贸流通业发展的现状、问题与对策

本文首先分析了新疆商贸流通业发展中取得的成绩,同时也指出了发展中存在的问题和不足,最后提出了进一步加快新疆商贸流通业发展的思路和对策。     

电子商务时代的技术创新、人力资本与经济增长

本文将技术创新、交易成本和人力资本引入经济增长模型，求出最优人力资本投入．并结合交易成本分析电子商务对经济增长和人力资本的影响。研究发现，在新经济时代．由于技术创新和知识累积使交易成本降低，就长期而言，人们会增加入力资本用于生产的比例．而减少用于教育的比例。在静态均衡分析中，本文进一步讨论人均消费、人均产出和人均资本增长率与交易成本、技术创新及知识累积的关系。     

The quantity theory in New England, 1703-1749: new data to analyze an old question

The finding of Robert West that the classical quantity theory of money clearly holds for New England (at variance with results for the rest of Colonial America) is revisited, with care taken to guard against spurious data and spurious regression. Thus alternative measures of price and money and modern econometric techniques are employed. The quantity theory of Milton Friedman is shown to be complementary to classical quantity theory, and both theories are tested via modern time-series analysis. The West data lead to mixed results; but the new data and technique support both quantity theories.     

Steam power, establishment size, and labor productivity growth in nineteenth century American manufacturing

We use establishment-level data from the 1850–1880 censuses of manufacturing to study the relationships among establishment size, steam power use, and labor productivity. Large establishments, measured here by employment, were much more likely to use steam power than smaller establishments. By 1880, slightly more than half of all manufacturing workers were employed in establishments using steam power, compared with 17 percent in 1850 and we show that, after controlling for various establishment characteristics, steam-powered establishments had higher labor productivity than establishments using other sources of power. Moreover, this productivity differential was increasing in establishment size.     

Emerging markets, evolving institutions, and the new opportunities for growth in China's rural economy

In this essay, our goal is to assess the state of China's rural economy and examine whether rural China is capable of participating in the sequence of economic events that will lead to modernization. We examine how agricultural productivity has changed, the nature of the shift of labor moving from rural to urban areas, how commodity markets have evolved, and how the rural industrial sector is adjusting the recent reforms. According to our own work and that of others, we show how the rural economy is beginning to be fundamentally transformed and is contributing to China's modernization.     

Opposing Prêt-à-Porter: Mills,Guilds and Government on Ready-made Clothing in Early Nineteenth-Century Stockholm

Abstract

This article discusses how economic thought constituted an institutional obstacle to the development of a consumer society in Sweden, during the decades around the year 1800, with reference to the production and distribution of ready-made clothing. The analysis is based on the discussions sparked by the Stockholm Tailor's Guild's repeated applications for permission to open a ‘clothes warehouse’. The article examines the positions taken by the different actors on the local arena and on the state level. It argues that although rivalry over the local market and conflicts between different corporate bodies did play a role, the decisive factor in deciding the question was the role and position of the Swedish textile industry. Appeals to what was beneficial and of practical use to Stockholm inhabitants were countered by warnings of increased smuggling and weakened control over the quality of industrial and craft products, as well as arguments concerning the optimal uses of the country's workforce. Thus, an apparently simple application for permission to sew clothes together, and then sell them, developed into a discussion of the entire basis of Swedish society's economic structure.     

Of markets,might and mullahs: a case for equity,pluralism and tolerance in development

This paper tries to confront the ‘puzzlement’ of the development profession regarding the ‘best’ alternative strategies aimed at increasing employment, reducing poverty and promoting equity at the same time as fostering economic growth — and the ‘advocacy’ role that should or should not be played by that profession. The author argues that the issue lies in achieving a workable ‘meaning’ of development and then moving on to the moral ‘questions’ of value judgments and to the specific ‘problems’ that can be dealt with by science and social science. He suggests that a possible meaning of development is ‘to create more options for more people’ — ‘to achieve that the greatest number of people have the greatest number of options.’ He discusses the need for improving ‘life chances’ and considers the development policies which may or may not assist in this process. He tries to tie together conceptually the ideas of power and social change, consensus and conflict. Also in this context, the roles of participation, organization and mobilization are explored, especially their impact on different political systems. The analysis concludes with a plea for social, cultural and political pluralism — and thus, a commitment to tolerance. The author argues that these goals should be addressed by the development community without the hesitation sometimes attached to ‘protection of expertise’.     

Share liquidity, participation, and growth of the Boston market for industrial equities, 1854-1897

Financial economists have long believed that the liquidity of shares affects the level of participation in equity markets and is thus central to their deepening. This study examines the growth in industrial share liquidity that occurred in Boston over the latter half of the 19th century. From primary sources hitherto unused for scholarly investigations, namely the running annual worksheets of securities price fluctuations that underlie broker Joseph Martin’s volumes on the history of the Boston stock market, I construct broad-based indices of annual prices and returns for banking and industrial equities, as well as measures of real market capitalization. A series of vector autoregressive models then relate increases in liquidity, as measured by falling par values of industrial shares due to stock splits, write-downs and re-capitalizations, entries, and exits, to advances in prices and capitalizations among traded firms. The findings support the view that increases in participation were important for sustaining Boston as the nation’s leading industrial market until finally overtaken by New York sometime around 1900.     

Colonies,copper, and the market for inventive activity in England and Wales, 1680–1730

Between 1680 and 1730 the English and Welsh copper industry rose from the dead and by the mid‐eighteenth century it had become Europe's leading copper producer. The revival followed the extension of sugar cultivation in England's colonies and the creation of a strong new demand for copper, which was reflected in rising exports and rising prices. Buoyant demand created a favourable market for the inventive activity needed to cut costs in the native industry, which encouraged investment in a systematic programme of research and development and culminated in important breakthroughs in smelting and mining technologies which transformed the non‐ferrous metal industries. The story provides an insight into how the economic context shaped the way useful knowledge was produced and consumed. Colonial expansion not only provided England with additional resources overseas but also encouraged the reallocation of human and financial capital to make better use of slack resources at home. Empire and technical change intersected with positive consequences for economic growth.     

The relative efficiency of king's,ecclesiastical, and lay estates in Domesday Essex, 1086

In the Domesday survey of 1086, information on the inputs and output of most production units in the English economy was carefully collected by questionnaire survey and verified in court. In this paper, Essex estate data are used to assess whether similar production functions describe production for the three major classes of production unit in the economy – king's, ecclesiastical, and lay estates. A data envelopment analysis is undertaken to determine whether production on one class of estate was more efficient than on the others. The evidence suggests that production processes and management performance were similar on the three classes of estate.     

Thirty years of legal and economic reform in China: growth,institutions, and laws

China's impressive economic growth over three decades has seemingly occurred in the absence of a strong legal system. This paper views China's reform process over the past three decades as one that has entailed a gradual introduction of market forces into areas of the economy, which requires both dismantling the structure of the centrally planned economy and developing market-oriented institutions. This paper argues that China's transition is premised on a set of informal, and increasingly formal, institutions that provided incentives during the process of gradual liberalization. Therefore, institutional developments were not absent. The exploration of the interplay between growth and institutions leads to the conclusion that continued economic growth in China will depend on implementing legal reforms better suited to the nature of the decentralized economy, hastened by the introduction of international economic laws and rules with greater global integration.     

Estimating Long-Run Incarceration Rates for Australia,Canada, England and Wales,New Zealand,and the United States

Compiling data from dozens of archival sources, I assemble the most extensive series to date of the long-run imprisonment rate for five English-speaking nations: Australia, Canada, England and Wales, New Zealand, and the United States. These series are constructed as a share of adults rather than the entire population, and I discuss why the latter can be misleading. In the late-nineteenth century, Australia had the highest incarceration rate of these nations. Today, the United States has the highest rate. With the exception of Canada, incarceration rates have risen markedly since the mid-1980s. These new series are made available in full, to allow other researchers to explore the consequences and causes of incarceration.     

Mortality, interest rates, investment, and agricultural production in 18th century England

This paper shows that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the 17th century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in pre-industrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis, I claim that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock and land fertility, the increase in agricultural land, and higher production per acre. I analyze this dynamic interaction using an overlapping generations model and show that the evolution of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern.     

Managing resource dependency: The United States and Japan in the markets for copper,iron ore and bauxite

This study analyses the different arrangements through which the US and Japan have procured their imports of non-fuel minerals, and attempts to shed light on the likely implications of these arrangements for the relations between these two countries. It focuses on three critical minerals — copper, iron ore and bauxite — which, after oil, constitute the core of every industrial society. Because both the US and Japan exhibit high levels of dependence on foreign supplies of these three minerals, it is clear that ensuring adequate supplies at reasonable costs will be a major guiding force in their respective future policies. This paper examines factors affecting the international markets for these minerals, the structure of investment, production and trade, and the relations with the source countries.From the discussion of these issues two paradoxical themes emerge: (1) that Japan has been able to procure much of her raw materials during the 1960s and 1970s at more favourable terms than has the US, even though the latter country had tighter links to its supply sources; (2) that the changing conditions in the minerals industries under study have resulted in recent years in a convergence in the procurement mechanisms of the US and Japan and this convergence is likely to increase strains on US-Japanese relations.     

英国、美国、新加坡城市公用事业监管比较研究

本文主要对英国、美国、新加坡公用事业市场化改革以及监管进行比较分析,进而指出这些国家的监管经验对于完善我国公用事业监管的启示及借鉴作用。