A struggle for industrialization is one of the major themes of the recent history of not only Brazil, but virtually the whole of Latin America. The historical evolution of that struggle finds a common denominator in the structural similarities of the national economies of the region. Assessment of Brazil's experience in the post-1929 period should therefore yield insights into the problems that Latin America as a whole faced during the international upheaval spawned by the financial collapse of 1929. Such an appraisal may also provide empirical assistance for the elaboration of future comparative studies. The specific analytical focus of this article is the attitude of Getúlio Vargas' government toward industrialization and planning, a theme whose re-evaluation serves, furthermore, to do justice to the enigmatic and reluctant revolutionary who governed Brazil during critical years and depression and war.

We use the Soviet state and party archives to study the creation of the Soviet financial system. Although its framers intended to centralize all emission and monitoring of money and credit, in practice the system was characterized by informal mechanisms involving multiple players, soft budget constraints, and massive moral hazards. Enterprises issued “illegal” commercial credits and surrogate monies, causing liquidity growth to far outpace real economic activity. When confronted with the choice of solvency versus plan fulfillment, firms always chose the latter: credit risks were passed on to solvent enterprises, the state bank, and the state budget.

This article analyzes a newly constructed individual level dataset of every English death and probate from 1892–1992. This analysis shows that the twentieth century’s “Great Equalization” of wealth stalled in mid-century. The probate rate, which captures the proportion of English holding any significant wealth at death rose from 10 percent in the 1890s to 40 percent by 1950 and has stagnated to 1992. Despite the large declines in the wealth share of the top 1 percent, from 73 to 20 percent, the median English individual died with almost nothing throughout. All changes in inequality after 1950 involve a reshuffling of wealth within the top 30 percent. I translate the individual level data to synthetic households; the majority have at least one member probated. Yet the bottom 60 percent of households hold only 12 percent of all wealth, at their peak wealth-holding level, in the early 1990s. I also compare the new wealth data with existing estimates of top wealth shares, home-ownership trends, wealth survey distributions, aggregate wealth, and the wealth Gini coefficient.

From the days of the confederation through the nineteenth century, the frontier land speculator was a familiar figure in the United States. Perambulating foreigners recorded the activities of this gentleman, and land speculation was discussed in both Congress and in the editorial columns of Western newspapers. Many twentieth-century students of America's political and economic development have dealt in one way or another with frontier land speculation. They have depicted the land speculator at times as a sinister figure, corroding the morals of national or state legislators as the lawmakers endeavored to formulate land policy. Writers have sketched the antagonism between speculator and “actual settler.” Nor have they ignored the effect which the speculator had upon the social and economic development of the region in which he operated. Such commentators have contributed to a literature that has its share of colorful characters and even displays the occasional symbol: star-crossed Robert Morris entering debtors'

Although we still live in the shadow of the years between the First and the Second World Wars, already it seems quite clear that future historians of economic thought will regard John Maynard Keynes as the outstanding economist of this turbulent period. As one writer has recently said, “The rapid and widespread adoption of the Keynesian theory by contemporary economists, particularly by those who at first were highly critical, will probably be recorded in the future history of economic thought as an extraordinary happening.” Book after book by leading economists acknowledges a heavy debt to the stimulating thought of Lord Keynes. The younger generation of economists, especially those whose thinking matured during the great depression of the thirties, have been particularly influenced by him.

The prevailing view of new mechanical technology is that it has, in large part, pushed labor out of agriculture. An alternative hypothesis is that labor has been pulled out of agriculture by higher wages in nonfarm occupations. The mechanical cotton harvester is used to test the two hypotheses. Estimation of a simultaneous-equation model of the labor market for cotton pickers reveals 79 percent of reduction in hand picking of cotton was due to increased nonfarm wages—the pull effect; the remaining 21 percent is attributed to the decreased cost of machine harvesting—the push effect.

American and European economists who work in the least developed countries of Africa, Asia, or the Middle East sometimes come away with the feeling of having learned more than they imparted. Nor is this surprising: the minds of economists are often more receptive to development than are the exotic economies in which they now work. In considering problems of underdevelopment and processes of development we learn—inadvertently, as it were—new things about conventional fields of economics and about the developed economies of Europe and America. These feedbacks have been particularly valuable to economic historians who have given us fresh insights into European, Russian, Japanese, and American development as a direct consequence of the present concern with developing the backward countries. Economic history is now wedded to economic development.

This article presents new estimates of the Italian utilities industries' production from 1861 to 1913. The improvements over the currently available series include the restriction of the electricity series to the production of the electric utilities, the extrapolation of the gas production series to 1861, and the calculation of production series for the water supply industry. These new estimates suggest that the existing aggregate production series significantly overstates the utilities' growth rate. The existing utilities series for other countries do not incorporate separate estimates for the water supply industry, and also appear to overstate the industryapos;s growth rate.

Between 1890 and 1914, California agriculture rapidly shifted from extensive to intensive crops, emerging as one of the world's major suppliers of Mediterranean products. Based on an analysis of new data on price and quantity movements, this article calls into question the traditional emphasis on changes in transportation, water, and labor market conditions as explanations for California's transformation. It argues that increases in fruit supply outpaced increases in demand and that declining farm interest rates and biological learning played crucial, if relatively neglected, roles in the intensification process.

A discussion fifty years ago of comparative economic history would have taken a broader view and would probably have been concerned very largely with exploring along the trails blazed by Max Weber and Marc Bloch. They were interested in many other aspects of economic history besides economic growth and I hope that similar broader interests will shortly show signs of reanimation. In spite of the present popularity of quantitative studies of changes in production, I hope some discussions at this meeting will examine comparative studies of forms of economic organization and the human qualities those structures reflected or generated. But my remarks here accord with the present preoccupation with that kind of economic history in which the all-important questions relate to the causes of economic growth. And I limit myself to one aspect only, the influence of governments.

Executive pay fell during the 1940s, marking the last notable decrease in the past 70 years. We study this decline using a new panel data set on the remuneration of top executives in 246 firms. Government regulation—including explicit salary restrictions and taxation—had, at best, a modest effect on executive pay. By contrast, a decline in the returns to firm size and an increase in the power of labor unions contributed greatly to the reduction in executive compensation relative to other workers’ earnings from 1940 to 1946. The continued decrease in relative executive pay remains largely unexplained.

The transition from sailing ship to steamship is analyzed for European immigrants arriving at New York City. Based on information taken from the U.S. Passenger Lists, new estimates of the timing and length of the transition are provided. Though the accepted model suggests the changeover from sail to steam could occur in only a few years, it actually took about 15 years in the Europe to New York immigrant trade. The slow transition is found to be due to slow construction of new steamships given uncertainty concerning immigrant volume and new steamship technology.

The most important change in nineteenth century emigrant transportation was that from sail to steam.

Gunter MoltmannMoltmann, “Steamship Transport,” p. 311.

…the transition from sail to steam in the transatlantic immigrant trade was an event of enormous significance for the history of immigration.

Maldwyn Allen JonesJones, American Immigration, p. 157.

By the mid-eighteenth century, tidewater Chesapeake households at all levels of wealth were both able and willing to buy a wide range of non-essential consumer goods either previously unavailable or long considered unimportant. The use of amenities and often luxuries as props for increasingly elaborated and differentiated life styles was not a result of country folk imitating city consumption patterns, however. Urban life styles did produce new spending habits, but the vast majority of the population who lived in rural areas managed to improve their consumption levels without altering traditional patterns of resource allocation.

Herring exports to the Baltic from the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were closely related to exports of the previous year rather than to aggregate levels of trade. Dutch domination of the European market for salted herring in the seventeenth century thus cannot be explained by some external factor but rather by the internal nature of the Dutch fishery: by technology, organization, and the institutions which administered it. Regulation was designed to maximize rents but, as other fishermen gained the skills of their Dutch competitors, that strategy'turned into one which at first limited sales and then returns to the Dutch industry.

… O, wot een gulden Neeringh

en voedsel brengt ons toe de Conincklijke Heringh;

hoe menig duysend ziel bij dezen handel leeft en

winnende sijn brood God dank en eere gheeft.

The wage book of a Derbyshire farm, which includes payments to laborers for 1772 to 1775 and 1831 to 1845, allows me to examine the employment patterns of male and female day-laborers at this farm before and after important innovations in agriculture. I find a fall in relative female employment which appears to be due to a fall in demand. Male employment shifted to the spring, but female employment maintained the same seasonal pattern. These seasonal and sexual shifts in the demand for labor probably resulted from the changes in animal husbandry that followed enclosure.

Seventeenth-century English immigrants to the Chesapeake and their children experienced a trade-off. They died early and raised few children who survived to adulthood, most worked harder than in England at more boring tasks, and, except for food, they had a material standard of living inferior to what the homeland could offer at equivalent levels of wealth; but people ate well, there was work for all, and until late in the century the poor who lived long enough found opportunities not available in England to exercise control of their lives—opportunities to acquire land and the economic independence and community standing that it brought.

We examine bargaining between the Northwest Company and the Hudson's Bay Company using recent models of bargaining under incomplete information. Two previously undisturbed bodies of correspondence are analyzed: letters between the two companies and letters between the Hudson's Bay Company and its London committee. Through merger the companies achieved a joint maximum, but the lengthy and costly bargaining process dissipated much of the potential gain through depletion of animal stocks. Achievement of a joint maximum was hindered by incomplete information, commitment to a strategy which led to bargaining breakdowns, delineation of each party's rights under law, and environmental changes.

The American people have usually been regarded as forward-looking and progressive, willing frequently to move their activities from one place to another to attain their hopes and inclined to be impatient with the heritage of the past. But there seems to have been, almost from the beginning, a minority of people in this country who found pleasure in looking back over the road that they and their forebears had traveled and in encouraging a scholarly chronicling of such progress. Perhaps the fact that so many early immigrants came from western Europe, with its much longer high-ways of economic and cultural advance, had something to do with this. But there was also the circumstance that the early settlers in America, as well as many later migrants to our West, were a Bible-reading people. The Bible is, after all, a record of movements among peoples through the centuries, and the duty placed on members of Protestant churches to become thoroughly familiar with their source of divine guidance could well have implanted a bias toward, or a fondness for, historical ideas and writings. And the citizens of a new country, it may be suggested, could hardly fail to be conscious of change through time as a true fact of life.

Some leading modern theories of exchange-rate determination are pitted against each other in explaining fundamental movements of the freely floating U.S. dollar in the foreign-exchange market during the greenback period, 1862–1878. A purchasing-power-parity theory augmented to incorporate interest-rate, and possibly income, effects provides the best explanation of the exchange rate. The standard works on the greenback period are subject to some amendments in light of the study.

An Essential factor in the rise of the investment banker to a dominant position in the American economy in the decades following 1880 was his command of the mobilized savings of the country's financial institutions. While considerable research has been devoted to the investment bankers' domination of transport and industry, little attention has been paid to their organization of financial institutions and their significance for the development of these institutions and their reorientation toward the securities market. This paper is a study of the relationship between the large life insurance companies and investment banking in the years immediately preceding the Armstrong Investigation.