Old times,better times? German miners' Knappschaften,pay-as-you-go pensions,and implicit rates of return, 1854–1913

This paper contributes to the literature on the weakness of modern pay-as-you-go social security systems in financing pensions by taking a business and economic historical perspective on the issue. It focuses on Prussian Knappschaften (plural ofKnappschaft), which provided miners with compulsory invalidity and implicit old-age insurance, and studies the period from 1854 to 1913. Knappschaften used the pay-as-you-go mechanism, and, in the long term, came under financial pressure from the rising number of pensioners. The question to be answered is whether Knappschaften were able to offer cohorts of miners entering the system at different times the same implicit rates of return. Did Knappschaften provide an intergenerationally sustainable policy, or did adjustments of contributions and other parameters decrease the dividend for insured miners over time?     

The Danish cattle trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Abstract

Danish production and exports of oxen have been the subject of frequent investigation from various points of view. Historians have chiefly tended to stress the social lop-sidedness of the trade and the dependence of these exports on the vicissitudes of the international market. While the dominant political position of the Danish nobles enabled them to monopolize the production of oxen, their economic prosperity depended on the successful maintenance of the exports.¹ Against this interpretation, however, some historians have argued that the cattle production was not only of fundamental importance to Danish agriculture but that it also made a significant contribution to the European supply. According to Erik Arup, oxen provided Denmark in the fifteenth century with an export commodity of high quality, and Astrid Friis has stressed the fundamental importance of oxen exports to the economic development of sixteenthcentury Denmark. Both interpretations, however, maintain that the production and export of oxen provided a solid economic foundation for the aristocratic rule of Denmark.²     

休克疗法与制度移植:新的争论以及1806年后普鲁士和西南德国改革的启示

经济学界关于休克疗法和渐进主义的争论又有了新的发展,这一次是有关发展中和新兴国家的。法国大革命及其对其他欧洲国家的影响,已经作为一个历史案例,在讨论大爆炸改革策略的优缺点时被屡屡提及。文章为1806年后普鲁士和西南德国改革之间的比较提供了一个特别有趣的历史案例研究,这到目前为止并未得到应有的重视。这个案例研究将揭示社会转型过程中经济和政治之间的深层次互动,因而对不同的经济改革策略的评价不能也不应该脱离对政治初始条件的考量。从最近的改革经验来看,一个特别有趣的发现是,普鲁士可能提供了第一个政府被东易北容克(East-Elbian Junkers)俘获的历史案例。     

Privatisation and corruption in historical perspective: The case of secularisation in Bavaria and Prussia in the early nineteenth century

Abstract

The article deals with privatisation and the valuation of such processes in Germany around 1800. Therefore, it focuses on a topic that has rarely been studied by historians for any time period, although the phenomenon was widespread in the past. The author argues that secularisation in 1803–1810 can be seen as an important privatisation process, because it included large transfers of former church property into private hands. Furthermore, he shows that a new generation of officials benefited from this process, although they had denounced comparable practices as corruption in the previous decades. They could easily justify such advantageous transfers publicly with their self-perception as an administrative and entrepreneurial elite. However, contemporaries publicly accused their actions and the secularisation itself of being corrupt. The author shows that privatisation was already a publicly discussed issue in the nineteenth century and needed to be justified. A history of privatisation, as the author finally states, allows insights into contemporaneous concepts of markets, state and welfare, and their effect in the respective time period.     

The Laspeyres-Paradox: tax overshifting in nineteenth century Prussia

Following the seminal work of the late nineteenth century economist Etienne Laspeyres I analyse the incidence of the Prussian milling and slaughter tax shortly before its repeal in 1875. A comparison of flour prices in cities which levied this tax with those that did not reveals unusually strong tax overshifting. Modern theories explain overshifting of a specific tax with quality improvements or imperfect competition. In pursuing these ideas I find that it was rather large surplus costs induced by tax collection and monitoring that caused unusually large excess burdens. The reason why the tax remained basically unchanged for more than half a century is that the urban bourgeoisie successfully prevented its repeal, as the alternative would have been the introduction of municipal direct taxes (rent-seeking behaviour).