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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2011
1 See Dumke, Rolf H., “‘Historical Economics’ in Deutschland: Ein Überblick,” Historicum 28 (1992): 21–25 Google Scholar, for an overview of cliometrics in Germany.
2 Eisner, Robert, “Capital Formation: Where, Why, and How Much? Capital Shortage: Myth and Reality,” American Economic Review 67 (1977): 110–15Google Scholar.
3 Tilly, Richard H., “Capital Formation in Germany in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. Mathias, Peter and Postan, M. M., vol. 7, part 1 (New York, 1978 Google Scholar).
4 Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Did English Factor Markets Fail during the Industrial Revolution,” Oxford Economic Papers 39 (1987): 641–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coping with City Growth during the British Industrial Revolution (New York, 1990 Google Scholar); see especially chap. 7, “Did British Labor Markets Fail during the Industrial Revolution?”
5 It is also a good example of the simultaneous publication of papers on an important scholarly theme. Williamson's, Jeffrey article, “Regional Inequality and the Process of National Development: A Description of the Patterns,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 13 (1965): 1–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and that by Orsagh, T., “The Probable Geographical Distribution of German Income, 1882–1963,” Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft 124 (1968): 280–311 Google Scholar, also attempted to measure the patterns of regional inequality over the development process.
6 Good, David, “Uneven Development in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparison of the Habsburg Empire and the United States,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971): 137–51Google Scholar.
7 Lundgreen, Peter (with a contribution by A. P. Thirlwall), “Educational Expansion and Economic Growth in 19th Century Germany,” in Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education, ed. Stone, Lawrence (Baltimore, Md., 1976 Google Scholar).
8 A diffusion of Borchardt's work in Europe, in contrast, has already taken place. See Boltho, Andrea, “Did Policy Activism Work?” European Economic Review 33 (1989): 1709–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Boltho finds that the period 1950–79 was “unprecedentedly stable” in comparison with earlier periods (1870–1913 and 1922–37) for seventeen countries as a whole. However, he states (p. 1723), “It is readily admitted that this greater cyclical stability of real variables may find a counterpart in a greater cyclical instability of nominal or financial variables.”
9 See Bailey's, M. classic article, “Stabilization Policy and Private Economic Behavior,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1978): 11–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the recent useful study by De Haan, J. and Zelhorst, D., “Stabilization of the Economy: Some More International Evidence,” Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review 171 (Dec. 1989): 431–40Google Scholar. The standard deviation of GDP growth rates and other measures of economic fluctuations are calculated for nine countries between 1871 and 1984 and for different subperiods. Unfortunately, the results are mixed: “the stabilization results are heavily influenced by the choice of the measure of volatility” (p. 437), and the results of the comparison of the 1871–1913 and the 1951–84 periods “give no clear answer to the question of whether economic fluctuations have flattened out” (p. 439) for all nine countries. In the case of Germany, the standard deviation of GDP growth rates rises from 0.023 in 1871–1913 to 0.028 in 1951–73, and to 0.032 in 1954–84.
10 Shapiro, Matthew D., “The Stabilization of the U.S. Economy: Evidence from the Stock Market,” American Economic Review 78 (1988): 1067–79Google Scholar.
11 Romer, Christina, “Is the Stabilization of the Postwar Economy a Figment of the Data?” American Economic Review 76 (1986): 314–34Google Scholar. See also Weir, D., “The Reliability of Historical Macroeconomic Data for Comparing Cyclical Stability,” Journal of Economic History 46 (June 1986): 353–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 On the basis of a somewhat different and a twenty-year longer data base than the one employed by Borchardt and myself (Statistisches Bundesamt, , Bevölkerung und Wirtschaft [Wiesbaden, 1972 Google Scholar]), J. B. DeLong and M. Brecht, “‘Excess Volatility’ and the German Stock Market, 1876–1990,” NBER Working Paper No. 4054 (April 1992), find that in comparison to the pre-First World War phase from 1880 to 1913, the post-Second World War era until 1990 exhibits greater variability in an index of real share prices, even when the unusually volatile decade of the 1950s is removed from analysis. Moreover, in comparison with naïve estimates of stock market fundamentals, pre-First World War stock price fluctuations were unusually mild.
DeLong and Brecht argue that “the behavior of the pre—World War I German stock market is thus in sharp contrast to the behavior of the post—World War II German stock market, and to the behavior of the U.S. stock market in either the pre—World War I or the post—World War II period. We speculate that the dominance of the German Großbanken in the securities industry in the years before World War I may be the cause of the exceptional behavior of the pre—World War I German market” (p. 2).
13 A convenient survey of arguments in English can be found in von Kruedener, J. Baron, ed., Economic Crisis and Political Collapse: The Weimar Republic, 1924–1933 (New York, 1990 Google Scholar).
14 Usher, Dan, The Economic Prerequisite to Democracy (New York, 1981 Google Scholar).
15 Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, “Was the Policy of Deflation in Germany Unavoidable?” in von Kruedener, ed., Economic Crisis and Political Collapse.
16 Webb, Stephen, Hyperinflation and Stabilization in Weimar Germany (New York, 1989 Google Scholar).
17 Frey, B. S. and Week, H., “Hat Arbeitslosigkeit den Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus bewirkt?” (Did Unemployment Lead to the Rise of National Socialism?), Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 196 (1981): 1–31 Google Scholar, document a very high correlation between NSDAP share of the vote and unemployment rates at the macro level.
18 Strangely enough, there is no paper on the dimensions of the electoral successes of the NSDAP in the otherwise excellent and up-to-date collection of essays on the political crisis of the early 1930s edited by Winkler, Heinrich, Die deutsche Staatskrise, 1930–1933: Handlungsspielräume und Alternataiven (Munich, 1992 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). This omission indicates a general weakness in German electoral history of the Weimar period: an uneasiness about the role of unemployment in furthering Nazi electoral successes.
A recent sophisticated statistical investigation of the effect of the unemployment rate on NSDAP electoral success confirms the results of the Frey and Week study. See van Riel, Arthur and Schram, Arthur, “Weimar Economic Decline, Nazi Economic Recovery, and the Stabilization of Political Dictatorship,” Journal of Economic History 53 (1993): 71–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Matthews, K. G. P., “Could Lloyd George Have Done It? The Pledge Reexamined,” Oxford Economic Papers 41 (1989): 374–407 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Borchardt, Knut and Ritschl, Albrecht, “Could Brüning Have Done It?” European Economic Review 36 (1992): 695–701 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.