Inequality among the poor of eighteenth century Amsterdam

This paper examines nearly 1000 poor to middling citizen households from the city of Amsterdam with a view to assessing their place in the larger wealth distribution of the city as preliminarily sketched in the work of Soltow, van Zanden, and others. It utilizes the probate inventories drawn up by the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage, which when coupled with the marriage, baptism, and burial records of the city archives, allow for the reconstruction of the household circumstances, material, financial, and demographic, of the families associated with the institution. These data yield detailed information about precisely the kind of people who were systematically excluded from the tax registers and financial records which form the basis for our current knowledge about inequality among historical populations. The lower portion of the wealth distribution is described and then linked via housing rental rates to a more complete distribution of the various social classes in the city. Finally, the determinants of inequality within the ranks of the poor are examined and financial assets of even very small amounts are found to be critical in shaping the socio-economic experience of the lower citizenry.     

Structural change in the Dutch trade with the baltic in the eighteenth century

Abstract

Affluence easily veils failure and cripples creativity. In the eighteenth century, the Dutch Republic probably enjoyed the world's highest national per capita income. The Republic was the first state to ascend beyond the modest pre-industrial income levels, interestingly enough without itself industrializing. Yet, economically the Republic stagnated visibly. Ships on the international routes increasingly passed Amsterdam by and trade — the old foundation of prosperity — declined in the midst of a general revival of North and West European commerce. The stagnation affected all walks of economic life and created a feeling of resignation that baffled many attempts at redress.¹ The fascination with the fate of the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century arises in part from this juxtaposition of affluence and decay. Did structural change cause the decline of Dutch trade or was it precisely the want of structural adjustments that became fatal? There is a great deal of confusion in Dutch historiography on this issue. Johan de Vries — to start with the Nestor among the historians of the Dutch decline — speaks of ‘structural alterations in the trade’ that ultimately undermined the position     

The changing role of fairs in the long eighteenth century: evidence from the north midlands1

Despite the recent interest of historians in retailing and distribution, little attention has been paid to fairs. It has often been assumed that by 1800 they were mainly occasions for entertainment. Using a range of sources and focusing mainly on the north midlands, this article argues that many fairs remained significant during the eighteenth century for agricultural marketing, some business and financial transactions, and retailing. By the early nineteenth century, rapidly changing economic conditions, coupled with changed attitudes, threatened these traditional roles and fairs had to adapt or face inevitable decline.     

Prospects for Japanese-Russian trade expansion in the second half of the 1990s

During the Soviet period, trade between the USSR and Japan was relatively unimportant, constituting approximately 2 percent of the Soviet Union's total foreign trade turnover. The composition of trade goods, moreover, was primitive. The USSR exported unprocessed raw materials in exchange for high value added industrial products. This paper examines the impact of Russia's fledgling transition on its trade with Japan and finds some hopeful developments. Although the volume of trade has contracted, Russian exports are reviving, the commodity structure is adjusting appropriately to changes in relative prices, and embodied factor content is import-capital-intensive as required by the Leontief variant of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory. The primary cloud blighting this performance is Russia's continuing inability to export its industrial goods.     

Unemployment on account of market imperfection in the Netherlands since the second world war

Summary By means ofUV analysis it has been attempted to gain some insight into the development of unemployment on account of market imperfection in the Netherlands between 1956 and 1975. Three conclusions can be drawn. (i) The imperfection of the labour market has increased not inconsiderably between 1956 and 1975. (ii) Since the beginning of the Seventies structural unemployment has been caused both by the qualitative discrepancies between supply and demand and by a quantitative shortage of jobs. (iii) The increase in market imperfection must be ascribed above all to the steadily growing imperfection of the sections of the labour market corresponding to the occupational groups.[/p]Professor of Economics and Graduate Assistant, Universtiy of Groningen, The Netherlands.The authors would like to thank Professor Th. van de Klundert and their colleagues of the Department of Economics for their valuable comments on the first version of this article.     

Innovation, Knowledge Creation and Technology Policy: The Case of the Netherlands

This paper explores and analyses the concept of knowledge and its application in economics by means of the Schumpeterian framework provided by New Growth Theory. In doing so, we focus on the particular role of knowledge spillovers in a small open economy such as the Netherlands.     

东亚华人家族企业制度的协同演化分析

本文从知识、网络、治理之间联结的角度,提出企业制度分析的协同演化方法,并将这种方法应用于华人家族企业制度的比较分析中,以揭示东亚华人家族企业制度与西方现代企业制度之间的系统性差异和不同的演化模式。     

Variations in the regional distribution of cross-border activity of Swedish transnational corporations during the 20th century

Abstract

This article outlines variations in the regional distribution of foreign activity of eight of the most important long-standing Swedish industrial corporations during the last century. It focuses on foreign subsidiaries, employment and sales by these companies, to determine what were the principal long-term trends: globalization or Europeanization. A wave of Europeanization occurred around 1900–1929, when the companies began establishing their worldwide reach. Before the Great Depression, almost all had founded subsidiaries in both Europe and USA. During the 1950–79 period, all had established subsidiaries in all parts of the world. I show that geographical spread in Europe and the spread in the rest of the world have both been significant trends. During the latter part of the 2011 century, there was a considerable intensification of business activity outside Europe, which in most cases was accompanied by a relative decline of the share in foreign business activity of the home region.     

Analysis of inter-organizational learning and growth of the enterprise in technical innovation network

Learning experience and knowledge from cooperation partners help a finn to speed up its growth by raising its capability quickly. This paper defines the connotation of both inter-organizational learning and growth of a finn and analyses the particular role that inter-organizational learning plays in the growth of the finn. It presents a practical significance in inspiring enterprises to promote their own growth unceasingly through inter-organizational learning.     

The emergence of a private clientele for banks in the early eighteenth century: Hoare's Bank and some women customers1

The records of Hoare's Bank and the correspondence of six of its women customers show how these women started to use the new banking services both for transferring money and for trading in the stock market. It is clear that alongside their use of the new facilities, older systems of money transfer remained important for customers. Much of the business of the bank and its customers, including their ventures into the stock market, took place within groups of people united by kinship, religion, and politics.     

Post- war European economic development as an out of equilibrium growth path. The case of the Netherlands

The paper examines a number of aspects of post-war economic development of the Netherlands in the light of recent out of equilibrium growth theory. It contains a comparison of the stylized facts of the long run performance of the economies of the United States and the Netherlands which suggests that the US has been on an equilibrium growth path for more than a century, but that the Netherlands followed a radically different growth path, especially after 1945. It is attempted to explain this erratic behaviour of the investment ratio and the wage share after 1945 by examining two aspects more in detail: the financing of the acceleration of growth after 1945 and the phase of too rapid growth during the 1950s and 1960s, when the growth of the demand for labour tended to be higher than the increase in its supply.     

Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre‐industrial economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the middle of the eighteenth century

Research on economic inequality in early modern Europe is complicated by the lack of appropriate data for reconstructing income or wealth distributions. This article presents a study of income inequality in mid‐eighteenth‐century Old Castile (Spain) using the Ensenada Cadastre, a census conducted between 1749 and 1759. The article describes the information provided by this census and then discusses its advantages and disadvantages for reconstructing income profiles and calculating income inequality. This is followed by analysis of a dataset derived from the Cadastre that consists of more than 4,000 observations from Palencia (a province in northern Spain) and contains information on sources of household income, each household head's main occupation, residence location, and other household characteristics. Demographic data from this census is used to weight observations in the sample and thereby minimize selection bias. Findings show that inequality in eighteenth‐century Spain was probably substantial despite its relative backwardness; that the relationship between inequality and per capita income was not clear‐cut and was probably influenced by measurement of the higher incomes; and that although income inequality was largely driven by uneven land distribution, labour income also contributed to overall inequality—especially in urban centres.     

论我国西部地区企业家的产生机制

在经济的发展过程中,企业家的作用十分重要。首先,要界定企业家的定义,因为在市场经济中,企业家经常与职业经理人混同;其次,要明确企业家与职业经理人的角色安排,清楚区别企业家与职业经理人的特征变量;最后,要培养出优秀的企业家,必须完善企业家的产生机制,为企业家的产生创造良好的环境条件,尤其在我国西部欠发达地区,优秀企业家非常欠缺,完善企业家的产生机制就显得尤为重要。     

东西融合之悟性思维:伊隆·马斯克的隐喻谜团

悟性是企业家认知的至高境界,悟性思维是产生创造性认知的源泉。通过对技术型创业家伊隆·马斯克的视频访谈、在线互动和公开演讲文字及视频的分析,本文提炼出反映其思维特征的四个隐喻,包括"玻璃+深渊"、"知识语义树"、"跨界融通"和"第一性原理",并以这些隐喻与创新之间的内在联系为基础,在前期已经完成的关于中国传统悟性思维和悟性创新的理论构建和案例研究的基础上,探讨马斯克所兼具的东西方思维的某些特质,尤其是以此构建东西融合之悟性思维理论框架。