THE ECONOMICS AND ORGANISATION OF CHINESE MINING IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIA

This article describes Chinese mining in colonial Australia using the examples of gold mining in southern New South Wales (NSW) and the Northern Territory as well as tin mining in northern NSW. Chinese miners were often more successful than their European counterparts. One reason for this success was the effective use that the Chinese made of large cooperative groups, a particularly efficient way to work a mining claim. Earlier studies of Chinese mining in Australia chiefly chronicled the racism and violence experienced by the Chinese and underestimated their significant economic contribution. Reasserting their economic importance challenges an exclusive focus on race.     

We Used to Get and Give a Lot of Help: Networking,Cooperation and Knowledge Flow in the Hunter Valley Wine Cluster

The Hunter Valley, New South Wales, is both Australia's oldest continually producing wine region and a highly functioning wine business cluster. New generation cluster actors perceive that the region's concentration of historic family‐based firms has contributed to its strength. We have used rarely consulted and newly accessioned evidence from the 1820s to the 1920s to qualitatively test the extent to which early networking created pathways for knowledge flow in the region. Our cross‐disciplinary research into the historic depth of embedded cooperation reveals a little known feature of early Australian business history and complements the more commonplace breadth approach in cluster studies.     

A new look at the New South Wales Corps, 1790–1810

This paper shows the New South Wales Corps as a changing entity with a considerable impact on the New South Wales economy until 1810. Findings include the large number of men (1,645) who served in New South Wales, while the total population was less than 5,000, and the importance of the Corps as a source of free settlers in the period before free immigration. Convicts were recruited locally and as a group outweighed arrivals from the Savoy Military Prison, cited in the past as the bad element in the Corps. The Corps contained a reasonably high proportion of skilled men who contributed formally and informally to the colony’s productivity both before and after discharge. The study shows that the officer group was relatively stable before 1800 but that turnover was fairly high thereafter. Finally it is shown that the influence of the New South Wales Corps did not cease with its recall, for well over half the regiment remained in the colony, some seventy–one as settlers and 356 as troops under Macquarie’s command — including a special Veteran Corps.     

REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY

The regulation of the telecommunications industry in South Africa is, by design, a complex matter, since it is mired with overlaps of mandates between the regulator, Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) and the Competition Commission on competition matters, coupled with vetoing powers of the Minister of Communications. The Harvard Business Model is employed in this article to show that there is a lack of coordinated effort between the regulator and its supporting structures. This then compromises efficiency as demanded by Parliament from state enacted bodies. Since ICASA is faced with dynamic economic and regulatory challenges, it is recommended that the regulator be fully resourced and granted regulatory as well as competitive authority in the telecommunications industry.     

PROPOSALS FOR STRENGTHENING THE SARB'S INFLATION TARGETING REGIME

This paper proposes a set of criteria for efficient institutions derived form the New Institutional Economics literature and the IMF's Code of Good Practices on Transparency in Monetary and Financial Policie. These criteria are used to evaluate the institutional framework of South Africa's inflation targeting regime. A test for measuring the comprehensiveness of South Africa's inflation targeting regime is used to verify the results of the institutional evaluation. Finally, a matrix of proposed institutional reforms is constructed to address weaknesses identified by the institutional evaluation.     

CAPITAL CONTROLS AND THE LENDING BEHAVIOUR OF SOUTH AFRICAN BANKS: PRELIMINARY FINDINGS ON THE EXPECTED IMPACT OF BASEL II

Banking regulation has developed rapidly over the past few years. There is a growing realization that the regulatory environment must keep pace with globalization and with advances in the financial sector. The 1988 Basel Capital Accord was an attempt to align regulatory capital with the actual underlying risks that banks face, thereby improving the soundness of the banking sector. The New Basel Capital Accord, due for implementation in South Africa in 2007, refines this principle and remedies some of the flaws of the 1988 Accord. This paper considers whether such implementation would have an effect on lending patterns and credit expansion in South Africa. It falls into five parts. Section 1 examines the rationale for the 1988 Basel Accord and outlines the relevant features of the New Accord. Section 2 reviews some of the criticisms directed towards the New Accord, concentrating on the speculation that its implementation will adversely affect bank credit expansion. Section 3 proposes a method of research for assessing the effect of the New Accord in South Africa. Section 4 analyses the trends in South African banking and considers how the New Accord may affect bank behaviour. Section 5 concludes.     

VERTICAL INTEGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS: A COMPETITION ANALYSIS

This article develops an analytical framework that can be used to assess competition in South African telecommunications and, thereafter, applies this framework in an evaluation of vertical integration patterns in the telecommunications industry. It is shown that, despite recent regulatory reforms, substantial vertical competition concerns remain unaddressed in both fixed line and mobile telecommunications markets.     

Convict Transportation to New South Wales, 1787–1849: Mortality Rates Reconsidered

Previous research into Australian convict transportation has concluded that a significant downturn in mortality rates occurred with the appointment of naval surgeons as superintendents in 1815. Statistical analysis of convict ships sent to New South Wales between 1787 and 1849 shows a more significant downturn occurred in 1800, following the introduction of closer supervision of ships' surgeons. The contracting system established by the Navy Board in 1786 for the transportation of convicts to New South Wales could be made to work as long as government maintained an effective system of inspection and supervision.     

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.     

A new industry in an older industrial region: Skills, technology and linkages

It has been suggested that recent organisational change centred on functional integration, outsourcing and upskilling has raised prospects of economic development in peripheral regions. This paper examines the character of a new industry in an older industrial region for signs of such upgrading and increased local embeddedness. The paper discusses recent organisational change in the South Wales automotive component industry. Despite some organisational innovation, the main elements of the branch plant syndrome remain apparent in the South Wales automotive components industry.     

Reform in the contract state: Embedded directions in public procurement regulation in South Africa

As South Africa contemplates another episode of public procurement legal reform, we trace the post-apartheid history of such efforts and consider critical issues moving forward. South Africa has over the last few decades followed the international trend of an expanding ‘contract state’. Public procurement is increasingly important to state operational and allocative concerns. South Africa’s public procurement regime is progressively configured into a centrally steered but decentralised organisational form. Inflected through domestic public procurement politics, however, the development of this organisational form has been truncated, with the establishment of only limited central steering capacity producing a public procurement regulatory regime which is weak, fragmented and incoherent, contributing to problems of state incapacity and corruption. In 2013 South Africa’s Minister of Finance announced a major push to reform South Africa’s contract state. The effort aims to better establish, locate and extend public procurement regulatory authority. It has begun to elaborate a centre-led, strategic and increasingly developmental procurement methodology. It is moving towards more flexibility, effectively an attempt to reduce rigidity in rules while building more robust and distributed disciplinary mechanisms, ones which take account of deficits in regulatory capacity and political will. We consider the potentials and pitfalls of these movements and suggest ways to optimise them.     

Tied Houses, Taxes, and Technology: Concentration in the Brewing Industry of New South Wales, 1882 to 1932

The brewing industry in New South Wales reached its numerical peak of about eighty breweries in the 1880s, and then declined to five breweries by the 1930s. Three of these, controlled by two firms, supplied virtually the whole state. This numerical ebb represents a process of industry concentration, driven by the necessity to maximize efficiency through economies of scale. This article examines increased concentration through cost pressures which encouraged it, and transport and other improvements which facilitated it. The former included: restrictive licensing, licence reduction, and diminishing demand, and the consequent need to tie hotels to secure markets; the colonial beer duty, the federal beer excise, and related government supervision; and the introduction of new technology to the brewing industry to satisfy changing fashions. Accompanying its numerical decline went a spatial contraction, the result of market expansion by Sydney breweries, facilitated by rail transport and by improvements in the chemical stability of beer.     

Wages and wage policy: Australia in the Depression, 1924–34

The starting–point for this examination of the Australian wage–fixing system during the Great Depression is the recent conclusion by Gregory, Ho, and McDermott that the Commonwealth Court was ineffective in its attempt to impose a 10 per cent reduction in real wages. They argue that labour markets, centralized and decentralized, resisted the 10 per cent cut, so that wage policy played no part in the recovery from the Depression. By surveying the decisions and influence of the Commonwealth Court, and the wage–fixing institutions and wage outcomes in Victoria and New South Wales, this article concludes that the hypothesis of Gregory et al. cannot be supported. Contemporary views were closer to the mark.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed Lewis Johnman and Hugh Murphy, Scott Lithgow: Déjà Vu All Over Again! The Rise and Fall of a Shipbuilding Company. St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2005. xi + 364 pp. ISBN: 0 9738934 0 0. Softback US$15.00.
Reviewed by Tony Arnold
University of Leicester Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade. St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2005. xvi + 293 pp. ISBN: 0 9730073 9 7. Paperback US$15.
Reviewed by Tony Barrow
The Open University Adrian Jarvis, In Troubled Times: the Port of Liverpool, 1905–1938. St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2003. viii + 232 pp. ISBN: 0 9730073 6 2. Paperback US$15.00.
Reviewed by Gordon Boyce
Queensland University of Technology Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia. Melbourne: Scribe, 2005. 298 pp. ISBN: 1 920769 46 3. Paperback A$32.95.
Reviewed by Stephen Constantine
Lancaster University Takatoshi Ito and Andrew K. Rose, International Trade in East Asia (NBER East Asia Seminar on Economics, Volume 14). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 392 pp. ISBN: 0 226 37896 9. Cloth US$80.
Reviewed by Gary Hawke
Victoria University of Wellington Graeme Hunt, Centenary: One Hundred Years of State Insurance. Auckland: IAG New Zealand Ltd, 2005. 238 pp. ISBN: O 473 10097 5. Paperback $NZ29.95.
Reviewed by Frank Holmes
Victoria University of Wellington L. Sharon Davidson and Stephen Salisbury, Australia’s First Bank: 50 Years from the Wales to Westpac. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005. 407 pp. ISBN: 0 86840 791 7. Paperback $49.95.
Reviewed by Frank Holmes
Victoria University of Wellington Bruce Pennay, Making a City in the Country – The Albury‐Wodonga National Growth Centre Project 1973–2003. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005. xi + 387 pp. ISBN 0 86840 944 8. Paperback $49.95.
Reviewed by Twan Huybers
University of New South Wales at Australian Defence Force Academy Patricia Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006. viii + 409pp. ISBN: 0 86840 905 7. Paperback. $39.95.
Reviewed by Fergus King
Anglican Diocese of Newcastle Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi (eds), Economists in Parliament in the Liberal Age (1848–1920). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2005. xviii + 315 pp. ISBN: 0 7546 3965 7. Hardback £55.
Reviewed by Warren J. Samuels
Michigan State University     

South Africa in the Australian mirror: per capita real GDP in the Cape Colony,Natal, Victoria,and New South Wales, 1861–1909

This article compares the real GDP per capita of the Cape Colony and Natal between 1861 and 1909 with that of Australia's two most developed colonies, Victoria and New South Wales. Estimates of European and non‐European GDP per capita for both South African colonies are also provided. Together, this information allows for the first time an evaluation of the growth performance of these important parts of the South African economy in the colonial era. The article concludes that South African performance in this period was stronger than often assumed and that by the beginning of the twentieth century European South Africans, now more fully integrated into a British World economy, operated at a level of GDP per capita that matched and in some places may have exceeded that of Australians. Non‐European South Africans, however, did not share in these same advances.     

Skills,Origins and Literacy: A Comparison of the Bounty Immigrants into New South Wales in 1841, With the Convicts Resident in The Colony

In 1841, some 20,000 assisted immigrants arrived in New South Wales (including the province of Port Phillip) augmenting the existing population by approximately 15 per cent. Most of the European population consisted of convicts or ex‐convicts. The characteristics of the bounty immigrants who landed in 1841 have been analysed by McDonald and Richards, while a sample of approximately 20,000 convicts transported to New South Wales have been analysed by Nicholas et al. The main purpose of this article is to construct tables that, for the first time, compare the characteristics of all participants in the two inflows on, as far as possible, a common basis. The two groups display major differences in terms of sex, age, geographical origin, literacy, religion, and occupational skills. The novelty of this article is its provision of a new set of tables and its contextual analysis of the differences between the quantifiable characteristics of these two colonial workforces.     

Business,Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970

This article examines how businesses perceived political risk in South Asia and Latin America over the last half century. Employing data from an oral history database at Harvard Business School, the article identifies five major sources of political risk: macroeconomic and policy turbulence, excessive bureaucracy, political instability, corruption, and violence. Marked regional differences were identified in perceptions and responses to risks. Macroeconomic and policy turbulence was the biggest perceived source of risk in Latin America. Excessive bureaucracy was the biggest source of perceived risk in South Asia. South Asian businesses often avoided bureaucracies, while Latin Americans worked with them.     

ASYMMETRIC PRICE TRANSMISSION AND MARKET CONCENTRATION: AN INVESTIGATION INTO FOUR SOUTH AFRICAN AGRO-FOOD INDUSTRIES

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