Denmark and the OEEC, 1948–1959

Abstract

By the late 1940s, the Danish economy was dependent on competitive and specialised agricultural exports to the British and German markets, In the 1930s and 1940s, protective barriers had given rise to a home-market-oriented industry that secured the main part of urban employment. As a small country with low tariffs and a high foreign trade dependency Denmark embraced the Marshall Plan and the OEEC. However, due to its particular structure of foreign trade and the protectionist measures the Danish economy was vulnerable to the imbalances of the OEEC's Trade Liberalisation Programme, The Danish response was to commit the large economies to the legal framework within the OEEC. In the mid-1950s the Danish government turned to a more aggressive strategy combining the advocacy for liberalisation and freer agricultural trade with a deliberate delay of the liberalisation of industrial protection, While the Nordic customs union had little chance of seeing the light of day in the 1940s and early 1950s, inter-Nordic consultations remained a valuable tactical asset in the OEEC. However, in the mid-1950s the plans for a Nordic customs union became an important part of the Danish effort to bolster the country's bargaining position and to modernise and industrialise the economy.     

Norway's liberalisation of trade and payments in the 1950s

Abstract

While historical scholarship has focused on the domestic macroeconomic adjustment to trade liberalisation of the 1950s in terms of fiscal, monetary and incomes policies, this study deals with the liberalisation itself. From the perspective of the domestic political economy it provides an account of Norway's policies towards the European trade and payments schemes. It argues that although national ambitions were constrained by multilateral European liberalisation, a successful policy mix of exploiting EPU credits, delaying import quota liberalisation and selectively raising tariffs was pursued. It also argues that the government's sympathy towards the stillborn Nordic customs union in 1954 originated in this policy mix.     

A discussion with academician Eino Jutikkala

Abstract

Academician Eino Jutikkala was closely involved in the founding and editing of the Scandinavian Economic History Review from the very beginning. Professor Ernst Söderlund's first letter to Jutikkala came in the spring of 1950. The letter plans a common Nordic meeting in the coming autumn. Söderlund had written to five Finnish scholars with economic and social history interests, namely Professors Jutikkala, Hugo Pipping, Carl Erik Knoellinger and Bruno Suviranta as well as Minister of Finance Nils Meinander. Söderlund proposed that about a dozen scholars should meet in the autumn. The first letter from Söderlund is cast in very polite terms and is suggestive of a somewhat remote or new relationship.     

De noordse economische integratie

Summary The post-war attempts to achieve a Nordic regional economic integration have not yet been successful, partly as a result of the establishment of the European Free Trade Association. These attempts were apparently shelved when two of the four Nordic countries — Denmark and Norway — applied for a membership of the European Common Market. However pending the negotiations for entry to the EEC, a draft Treaty for the establishment of the Organization for Nordic Economic Co-operation (Nordec) was drawn up on the instruction of the governments of the Nordic countries. In this paper the possible effects of this regional Nordic Common Market, when established, are briefly analyzed. The author also investigates the increase in intra-Nordic trade since EFTA was created. In view of the interprenetation of Nordic trade flows resulting from EFTA, it is highly unlikely, that Sweden could remain outside a large, integrated European market, which Denmark and Norway had joined.      

The reliability of the english port books

Abstract

Modem trade statistics start with the series of English customs ledgers from 1696 onwards. The French ledgers of imports and exports follow twenty years later, the Swedish series (including Finland) begins in 1738, and the Scottish one in the 1750s.1 For other European countries they are even more recent. This means that before 1700 we have to rely on the customs books of various individual ports, except in occasional cases where reliable (or unreliable) compilations for a particular year, a commodity or an area are preserved. Of the latter, a Scottish historian, T. C. Smout, has recently written: ‘Customs books are an invaluable source for the historian of trade. In them he may discover the commodities exported and imported, he may read the names of ships, skippers and merchants, he may learn where they were bound and whence they came, and from them he may perhaps judge which places within the realm had the greatest traffic with foreign parts. Given a sufficiently long and unbroken series of customs material, he may be tempted to cull statistics about these and other matters. This, however, is a dangerous practice, for the books of the seventeenth century were designed merely as a record of dues paid to the Crown, and were not meant, like modern Board of Trade returns, as a mirror of commercial trends or as a register of the volume and value of goods passing in and out of the country.’²     

Silent spring and the nordic agricultural maqazines

Abstract

The connection between mad cow disease (BSE) and humans, and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Great Britain in February 2001, have shaken the principles of the commercial farming business. The great leap from mixed organic farming to commercial farming took place in the industrialised countries soon after the Second World War. Important preconditions for commercial farming were the new innovations made in the agricultural chemistry. The principles of commercial farming were for the first time called into question at the beginning of the 1960s by the late American biologist, Rachel Carson, in her book, Silent Spring (1962). The book was a ‘declaration of war’ on the chemical companies and researchers working with chemical crop-protection all over the world. Silent Spring was soon translated into the Nordic languages. This article focuses on the reactions of the leading Finnish and Swedish agricultural magazines to Carson's provocative claims. Among Swedish agricultural experts, Carson's book inspired a critical debate about the safety of chemical crop-protection, whereas in Finland the agricultural magazines wanted to skate over Carson's disagreeable accusations. The attitudes of the agricultural, magazines to Silent Spring are approached from agricultural political and ethical aspects.     

More on tariffs,import quotas,and customs unions

It is known that the welfare of a small, quota-imposing country will always increase after it joins a customs union because the trade diversion effect of a customs union never arises. However, this paper shows that the welfare of a large, quota-imposing country may increase, decrease, or remain the same after it joins a customs union even though the trade diversion effect of a customs union also never arises. The offer curve approach is used in this study.     

China’s rule of law in New Era: the rise of regulation and formalism

ABSTRACT

China’s financial development and economic growth is achieved under weak legal institutions. The literature attributes this counterexample of law–finance–growth nexus to (a) alternative mechanisms in China such as incentives, reputation and relationships and (b) a well-functioning xinfang system with common law features. In recent years, China has made increasing efforts to strengthen its rule of law. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has taken the lead by launching a far-reaching campaign against corruption, establishing a system of inspection tours, and promulgating a large number of regulations. We argue that using regulations to complement laws is effective: CPC has enough bureaucratic prowess to crack down on corruption whereas the courts are subject to subversion by powerful interests. We also discuss the drawbacks of this approach: regulations aiming at ex ante control of corruption substantially increase procedural formalism and limit the discretion of local governments and state-owned enterprises.     

Trade creation,trade diversion,and the general equilibrium effects of regional trade agreements: a study of the European Community–Turkey customs union

This paper presents an industry-level analysis of trade flows in order to estimate the trade effects of Turkey’s customs union with the European Community (EC). The paper is able to distinguish between trade creation and trade diversion by employing tariff data on each good to measure the impact of not only the tariff level but also the difference between tariffs applied to imports from Europe and the most-favored nation tariffs applied to imports from other non-preferential trading partners. The paper estimates the general equilibrium effects of the customs union in addition to the effects of eliminating tariffs on the EC’s exports to Turkey. It concludes that the customs union has generated more than twice as much trade creation as trade diversion but that the overall impact of the customs union has been relatively small.     

Spatial analysis of competition among local governments and the price of land: the case of Zhejiang Province

Abstract

This empirical study focuses on competition between local governments as they strive to attract companies through the auction of land use rights. In the literature on competition between local governments, the focus has tended to be toward growth rates based on performance evaluation or tax rate-based competition for attracting companies. In China, the property tax system is still underdeveloped and local governments cannot independently set tax rates. Therefore, this study focuses on a type of ‘dumping’ activity by which local governments auction land use rights to attract industrial companies and empirically test this hypothesis using the spatial lag model.     

Nordic historical National Accounts since the 1880s

Abstract

In many respects the history of National Accounts (NA) and of Historical National Accounts (HNA) is common to all the Nordic countries, The first rudimentary accounts can be found by the end of the nineteenth century while the first income tax statistics of the early twentieth century provided a further stimulus. It was the 1920s and the 1930s, however, that saw the real breakthrough. In Sweden it took the form of HNA, and in the other countries the form of NA, with Denmark and Norway in the lead. The commodity-flow method provided the common characteristic.

Later developments somewhat differed in the individual countries. All participated in the Kuznets project ofHNA. Denmark and Norway had obtained new series by the mid 1960s and the early 1970s. Sweden and Finland came later, at the end of the 1980s, and consequently today have the most up-to-date series. These though reveal differences in methodology and a new project has been started, whose aim is to revive the spirit of Nordic community.     

A note on customs unions vs. non-preferential tariffs

It has been shown by Cooper and Massell [1965] that making a non-preferential tariff reduction is always superior to joining a customs union. The purpose of this paper is to show that if the country concerned is a large country, then joining a customs union is not necessarily inferior to making a non-preferential tariff reduction.     

The Southern African customs union: A reappraisal

The paper attempts to evaluate, as far as possible quantitatively, the costs and benefits to the countries of the ‘Southern African periphery’ (Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland) of participation with South Africa in the current customs union agreement. On balancing the agreement's measurable effects (on industrial development, exports, government revenue and the cost of living) against one another, it appears that on sanguine assumptions only, there would be a substantial benefit to Botswana and a much more moderate benefit to Lesotho if the customs union were dismantled and replaced by separately protected national markets. Such a calculation, however, neglects what may be the most important benefit and cost to the ‘peripheral’ countries of leaving the customs union, namely the increase of ‘economic independence’ and the risk of South African retaliation respectively: themes which are explored in the final section.     

Path dependence and independent utility regulation: The case of Danish energy and telecommunications regulation

Abstract

The establishment of the Danish independent regulatory authorities for the energy and telecommunications sectors was based upon EU directives as part of their liberalisation process. Following the concepts of transaction costs and path dependency this article analyses differences in independence between the two authorities – the Danish Energy Regulatory Authority (Energitilsynet) and the National IT and Telecommunications Agency (IT- og Telestyrelsen) respectively. We find that the state's negligible interest in the energy sector until the 1970s formed the basis for strong energy companies capable of influencing regulation in their interest. This condition made DERA relatively dependent on commercial interests compared to NITA. In contrast, the state had an early interest in controlling and regulating telecommunications services, which meant strong control of the telecommunications companies and a regulation contingent upon political interests that has continued to this day. We therefore suggest that sector-specific institutional processes have caused differences between the regulatory institutions mediating the influence of the EU.     

Food consumption in the pre-industrial Nordic societies

Abstract

The article reviews different measures as to when the change from a survival society to a consumer society took place in the Nordic countries, and summarizes the results of earlier research. Among the measures used are foodstuff consumption, real wage levels, demographic development, and changes in human stature. The consumer revolution most likely started in Denmark before 1800 and in Norway and Sweden at the beginning of the nineteenth century, whereas in Finland and Iceland such change did not take place until after 1850.     

Trade Effects of the East African Community Customs Union: Hype Versus Reality

This study uses a theoretically consistent gravity model to assess the average trade effect of the East African Community customs union implemented in 2005. The estimation is carried out using a framework that controls for endogeneity. Country‐pair fixed effects are included to control for time constant factors while importer‐year and exporter‐year fixed effects account for time varying multilateral resistance variables. To check for robustness a Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood estimation is used. The study covers the period 2000 to 2013 with a total of forty nine trading partners. The results suggest that the EAC customs union has produced a moderate positive effect on intra‐EAC trade of about 22.1%.     

From expansion to panic and crash

Abstract

The object of this paper is to study, empirically and historically, the development of the Norwegian banking system from 1913 to 1924. The paper will also deal with bank-industry relations in the period. The ultimate purpose is to explain why the post-war slump of 1920–21 led to a major banking crisis in Norway in the twenties, more severe than in the other Nordic countries.     

Wealth and credit in the Finnish countryside, 1850–1910

Abstract

In Finland, the early phase of industrialisation, that period of transition when trade and industry began to assume modern form, commenced around the middle of the nineteenth century. A legislative programme of economic liberalism was implemented: steam sawmills were permitted, the customs system reformed, foreign trade freed from controls and rural trade allowed. The supply of credit to farming was eased by the mortgage credit institute. The Free Trade Act of 1879 was based on completely free entrepreneurial activity. These measures, together with exogenous economic factors, stimulated new economic and intellectual forces.¹     

Breaking up a customs union: The case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919

Breaking Up a Customs Union: The Case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919. — This study has used new estimates of the gravity model to analyze the effects on European trade patterns in the mid-1920s of the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its customs union after World War I. The gravity equation has been found to explain 70 percent of the variance of the trade flows of the principal trading nations in 1924–26. Moreover, the ties between the former members of the Austro-Hungarian Empire remained stronger than any other commercial relationship in Europe. They were second only in intensity — given economic and demographic factors — to those of the British Empire.     

J. G. Büsch's economic theory and his influence on the Danish economic and social debate

Abstract

In the economic debate that took place in Germany towards the close of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Büsch is a key figure. He occupies this posi tion by virtue of a profound knowledge of economic theory and a mass of writings which achieved a wide distribution not only in Germany but also in the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, France and Russia, a number of his works being translated into the languages of these countries.