Was 19th century British growth steam-powered?: the climacteric revisited

This paper establishes that there are serious problems with the hypothesis that the Victorian climacteric was driven by the decline phase of steam as a General Purpose Technology. This is primarily because steam’s contribution to industrial output and labour productivity growth was stronger after 1870 than before and that the non-steam-intensive sectors exhibited an inverted U-shape in trend output growth through the 19th century, experiencing a marked slowdown between 1830 and the 1870s. Seeking to base an account of 19th century British growth primarily on the implications of steam is thus misconceived.     

Asymmetric information in late 19th century cooperative insurance societies

Between 1880 and 1930, cooperative insurance was the main source of illness, accident, and death insurance in the United States, Canada, and England. This paper tests for asymmetric information in cooperative insurance societies and examines how their pricing policies affected the profile of members. We find strong evidence that, unlike their modern substitutes, cooperative societies were able to overcome the asymmetry of information. Furthermore, as a consequence of non-actuarial pricing, our results suggest that workers deferred their membership until they were about 40 years old.     

The problem of railway ownership in 19th century Finland

Abstract

Dr. Oredsson's extremely able and original doctoral dissertation! is concerned primarily with the issue of state versus private railway policy in certain countries. So far as Finland is concerned, he confines himself to strategic considerations, dismissing the subject of ownership with the statement: ‘All railways of major importance were built by the State’ (p. 23). The impression gained by the reader is that from the outset State ownership was regarded as self-evident in Finland. This, however, was not the case. My intention in this note is not to criticise Oredsson, but to supplement his account of the railway policy of Sweden's eastern neighbour.     

What drove 19th century commodity market integration?

This paper seeks to answer the titular question of what drove commodity market integration in the 19th century. Using grain markets during the first wave of globalization as a testing ground, the paper builds on the insights of the contemporary trade literature and the economic history of the 19th century and relates levels of market integration to cross-sectional and temporal variations in transport technology, geography, monetary regimes, commercial networks/policy, and conflict. The results of this decomposition analysis are interesting on two counts: first, they verify the commonality of experience of the 19th and late 20th centuries; second, they suggest a very strong role for the commercial, diplomatic, and monetary environment in which market integration took place.     

Expropriation of church wealth and political conflict in 19th century Colombia

The redefinition of Catholic Church property rights was common in Europe and the Americas during late eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Given the Church’s power and the level of political violence after independence, these reforms were influential in Latin America. This paper focuses on Colombia after 1850 and measures the impact of the expropriation of Church’s assets on political violence. With yearly data on the number of battles per municipality, archival information on the reform, and difference-in-differences, the paper documents a reduction of political violence in places where the Church’s assets were expropriated. The paper contests the traditional idea of the expropriation of Church’s real estate as a source of political violence. It highlights changes in political competition after the alliance between Conservative factions and the Church was weakened. Specifically, it shows the reduction in political violence was concentrated in municipalities with high political competition and where the Conservative Party was relatively weak.     

The historiography of French economic growth in the nineteenth century

There has been a long-standing debate about French nineteenth-century economic growth. After 1945 the ‘retardation—stagnation’ thesis dominated. From the 1960s ‘revisionists’ painted a more optimistic view. Recently, ‘anti-revisionism’ has revived gloomy ideas. New research has been primarily responsible for changes of view. National income estimates, and later cliometric studies, bolstered the revisionist argument. Work on the ‘great depression’ stimulated anti-revisionism. Scholars have also been influenced by the economic and political state of France at the time they were writing and the debate has been somewhat politicized. The article ends by surveying the ‘moderate revisionism’ which now prevails.     

The contribution of increased life expectancy to economic development in twentieth century Japan

This paper estimates the value of improved health in Japan over the twentieth century. By valuing the decline in the death rate and appending this to existing measures of GDP per capita it is possible to calculate health augmented GDP per capita growth and generate original results about the monetary value of improved life expectancy over the twentieth century in Japan. The findings of the paper indicate that this is a pertinent exercise because GDP per capita growth approximately doubles when it is extended to include increases in the life expectancy of the population of Japan. These results also provide a justification for the increase in health care service spending that was evident at the close of the twentieth century.     

Savings and early economic growth in the United States and Japan

The period of early economic growth in both the United States (the antebellum period) and Japan (the Meiji period) was marked by a pronounced rise in the rates of domestic saving and investment. This paper decomposes the observed changes in saving/investment rates and shows that substantial components – about two-thirds in US and more than one-third in Japan – were due to unexplained shifts in the saving function. In turn we argue that an important factor behind the exogenous shift in savings and hence behind the rise in the net investment rate was the increased degree of financial intermediation in each country.     

National and international market integration in the 19th century: Evidence from comovement

This paper analyzes relative wheat price fluctuations to investigate market integration among 72 European and US cities. Applying a Dynamic Factor Model, which has seldom been used in market integration analysis, prices are decomposed into international, national and local components. Thus, national and international market integration are identified by a statistical restriction, and results for each single market are obtained. The first result is that globalization has accelerated faster in the first than in the second half of the 19th century, putting the post-1850 transport revolution into perspective. The USA integrated only later into the European market, discounting the role of the “grain invasion” for trade history. I also show that the European nations that turned protectionist after 1880 reduced the impact of foreign shocks, while free traders fully integrated into the international economy.     

Health insurance reform and economic growth: Simulation analysis in Japan

This paper evaluates the drastic reforms of Japanese public health insurance initiated in 2006. We employ a computable general equilibrium framework to numerically examine the reforms for an aging Japan in the dynamic context of overlapping generations. Our simulation produced the following results: first, an increase in the co-payment rate, a prominent feature of the 2006 reform, would promote economic growth and welfare by encouraging private saving. Second, the ex-post moral hazard behavior following the increase in co-payment rates, however, reduces economic growth. Third, Japan's trend of increasing the future public health insurance benefits can mainly be explained by its aging population, and increasing the co-payment rate does little to reduce future payments of public health insurance benefits. Fourth, the effect on future economic burdens of reducing medical costs through efficiencies in public health insurance, emphasis on preventive medical care, or technological progress in the medical field is small. Finally, a policy of maintaining public health insurance at a fixed percentage of GDP will require reducing public health insurance benefits, perhaps up to 45% by 2050. Such a policy also reduces economic growth until approximately 2035. Our simulation indicates that the reform does not significantly reduce future public health insurance benefits, but it can enhance economic growth and welfare by encouraging private saving.     

Deindustrialization in 18th and 19th century India: Mughal decline, climate shocks and British industrial ascent

India was a major player in the world export market for textiles in the early 18th century, but by the middle of the 19th century it had lost all of its export market and much of its domestic market, primarily to Britain. The ensuing deindustrialization was greatest c1750-c1860. We ask how much of India’s deindustrialization was due to local supply-side forces—such as political fragmentation and a rising incidence of drought, and how much to world price shocks. An open, three-sector neo-Ricardian model organizes our thinking and a new relative price database implements the empirical analysis. We find local supply side forces were important from as early as 1700. We then assess the size of Indian deindustrialization in comparison with other parts of the periphery.     

Market integration and market efficiency: The case of 19th century Italy

This paper examines market integration in Italy in the 19th century, focusing on wheat. Wheat prices converged well before political Unification (1859-1861) but the process halted during the 1860s only to resume in the 1870s and 1880s. The first wave of integration was caused mainly by improvements in market efficiency while the second wave owed much to a reduction in transport costs.     

Voting rules and the success of connected lending in 19th century New England banks

How well do decision-making processes within firms serve as control mechanisms? The voting rules governing loan approval in early 19th century New England banks are analyzed to find out. These banks exhibited high levels of lending to directors and their associates. Some theories of corporate governance argue that this could lead to increased managerial opportunism. However, a model shows that banks that require more votes to be won in the loan approval process prevent projects with private gains and social costs. The historical data are consistent with the idea that higher levels of consensus raised the profitability of banks.     

Export performance and economic growth nexus in Japan: a bootstrap approach

This paper investigates the causal relationship between export growth and economic growth in Japan by performing augmented Granger-causality tests using the bootstrap simulation technique. The estimated results show that the Granger-causality is bi-directional for the period 1960–1999. The established bi-directional causality suggests that the expansion of exports is an integral part of the economic growth process in Japan.     

二十世纪九十年代以来中日通货紧缩的比较

中国与日本在二十世纪九十年代以来所经历的通货紧缩有诸多的相似点，由于两国对经济过热和通货紧缩的认识态度和治理措施的不同，中日两国的通货紧缩及其影响呈现出不同的态势。本文拟对两国通货紧缩的异同进行深入的比较分析。