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The Role of Institutional Influences in Patterns of Agricultural Development in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: A Cross-Section Quantitative Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Irma Adelman  and
Cynthia Taft Morris
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Abstract

In this paper we stratify a sample of 24 countries by the role of agriculture in industrial growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and focus on systematic differences in the nature and strength of the interactions of institutional with agricultural and industrial change. A novel technique, disjoint principal components models, is applied to categorized data representing 35 facets of social, economic, and political structure and institutions. The results stress the systematic variations in the impact of land institutions among countries with different levels and structures of development. They also underline the critical role of social and political forces in differentiating among paths of economic change. Finally, they highlight the need for cross-section studies using institutional data to understand better the complexity of institutional constraints and influences which often vary little in a given national environment.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 159 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1979

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References

1 The methodology applied in this paper is explained in greater detail and its limitations discussed in Adelman, Irma and Morris, Cynthia Taft, “Patterns of Industrialization in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: A Cross-Section Quantitative Study,” paper presented to the Cliometrics Conference, 05 1978, in Uselding, Paul, ed., Research in Economic History, Vol. 5 (forthcoming)Google Scholar. present paper is one of a series in which we focus successively on different patterns of socioeconomic and institutional change such as types of industrialization, the structure and course of poverty, and foreign trade and dependency relationships.

2 Full definitional schemes, country assignments, and sources for these five classification schemes may be obtained from the authors.

3 See Adelman, Irma and Morris, Cynthia Taft, Society, Politics, and Economic Development: A Quantitative Approach (2nd ed.; Baltimore, 1971)Google Scholar.

4 See , Adelman and , Morris, “Patterns of Industrialization,” App. B, for an exposition of the technique. It is based on Svante Wold, “Pattern Recognition by Means of Disjoint Principal Components Models,” Pattern Recognition, 1976, pp. 127–37Google Scholar.

5 See Adelman and Morris, “Patterns of Industrialization,” App. A, for brief definitions of the 35 classification schemes and the bibliography containing the full set of references used in classifying individual countries.

6 In the interpretation of a component as a process of change, the signs may be reversed since only the relationships among the signs in a given index are important.

7 Foreign trade variables are unfortunately omitted from the analysis.

8 The association of less political stability in this component has little importance since all class observations have high scores on political stability, Belgium's scores being only marginally lower than other scores. The inclusion of level of commodity market with a negative sign may be a peculiarity of the weight of the earliest period for Belgium, the main pattern of market development and economic growth having been captured by Component One.

9 The negative relation between agricultural improvements and the past spread of commodity markets is a peculiarity hard to explain since Australia, New Zealand, and Norway in 1890 all have high scores (for this sample) on both agricultural improvements and the past spread of commodity markets.

10 The section of the paper which discusses success in predicting class memberships of individual observations and the accompanying table giving the distance of each observation from the three classes closest to it have been omitted because of space constraints. Copies “of the section may be obtained from the authors.

11 The statements which follow are generalizations suggested by and consistent with the statistical results.

12 Jones, Eric L. and Woolf, Stuart J., eds., Agrarian Change and Economic Development (London, 1969), pp. 4–6Google Scholar.

13 North, Douglass C., “Comment,” this Journal, 38 (03 1978), 77Google Scholar.