The turn of economic events in the early 1970s correlates with a revival of ideas about the existence of long swings in economic development. The subject of Kondratieff cycles has attracted the pens of social scientists of very different persuasions. This paper draws on Walt W. Rostow's interpretation—with its emphasis on the role of exporters of food and raw materials in the world economy—to explore Australian long waves over the last 110 years. I conclude that the case for their existence is not confirmed and moreover that Rostow's cycle-mechanics offer a doubtful explication of movements in the Australian series.

The successful establishment of the European Common Market on January 1, 1959, has renewed interest in the tool by which this most ambitious of all economic integration projects has been accomplished. The interest is the greater as this is only the first of three attempts to integrate economic development on a continental scale. The others are the common markets envisioned for Africa and Latin America. This article is an attempt to convey in the briefest possible space the history of economic integration that preceded the current drive toward common markets.

Today's less developed countries maintain that high instability in export prices is a serious obstacle to their economic development. History shows, however, that some of today's developed countries also experienced high price instability in the international markets they served when they were at a comparable phase in the development process. Current recommendations to institute a network of international commodity agreements for the most important primary products exported by the LDCs seem beside the point in light of this evidence.

We apply disjoint principal components analysis to study institutional influences on the course of poverty in the nineteenth century. Classificatory data summarize varied facets of economic and noneconomic institutional structure and change.Four sets of countries are distinguished by characteristics of the course of poverty. The components models show that the impact of economic and demographic changes (export expansion, marketization, industrial expansion, immigration) have consequences for poverty that vary greatly between and within country sets, depending on the character of institutions: above all, land systems, dependence relationships, and political institutions.

I Take it that what lies in the back of the minds of most of us when a subject like this comes up is the problem of the relation between economic unrest and political and social change, and more especially, the kind of change we call a revolution. We all know those for whom the solution of this problem is very simple: they say “look for the economic motive” as innocently as if they said “cherchez la femme.” Even at a more mature level of thinking the problem is still often put in such a way that something economic always lies at the bottom, or pulls the trigger, or provides the main impulse, or—and this is the precious word—“determines” everything.

This article reconstructs the history of mutual assistance among Federal Reserve Banks. We present data on accommodation operations through which Reserve Banks mutualized gold reserves in emergency situations between 1913 and 1960. Reserve sharing was important in response to liquidity crises and bank runs. Such cooperation was essential for the cohesion of the U.S. monetary union. But fortunes could change, with emergency recipients of gold becoming providers. Because imbalances did not endlessly grow, instead narrowing when region-specific shocks subsided, mutual assistance created only limited tensions. These findings speak to the current debate over TARGET2 balances in Europe.

Richard Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth (2016) find that biases in height by age imposed by traders versus non-traders were negligible. Importantly, their method of identifying traders differs from that of Jonathan Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger (1992). Using a sample of inward coastwise manifests for the port of New Orleans, we show that Steckel and Ziebarth made errors classifying shippers, that they underestimate the relative number of slaves shipped by traders, and that their empirical estimates of selection bias are attenuated towards zero.

Although the total real cost of World War II to the Soviet people has yet to be fully tallied, there can be little doubt that it exceeds that of any other major participant, per capita as well as absolutely. The objective of this paper is to compare and evaluate the real war costs reported by the Soviets with those implied by Soviet pronouncements and those using Soviet national income data. Our purpose is to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.

The incidence of fatherlessness among English emigrant servants was measured using contracts recorded in London between 1682 and 1686. This incidence was relatively high and systematically related to the servant's age, gender, county of origin, occupation, and father's occupation. Many emigrant servants were youths who had lost their fathers and lacked alternative support in England. Fatherlessness helps explain why the short-run supply of emigrant servants was relatively inelastic, and why some unskilled servants continued to migrate to America in spite of competition from slave labor.

This article attempts to explain why the adoption of potentially productive institutions is delayed and why inefficient ones persist by exploring the dynamics of institutional change in a particular historical case—the closing of the Georgia open range in the late nineteenth century. A closed range policy would have generated net benefits for specific regions of Georgia, but distributional conflicts, coupled with high transaction costs, made a voluntary agreement to do that unattainable. The article describes the Georgia legislature's important role in facilitating the adoption of a policy that led to more rapid agricultural development in the postbellum period.

A chronology of invention in farming is given, based on patent data, for England between 1611 and 1850. The chronology is explained using market analysis. Technological constraints determined the timing of some inventions, most notably for fertilizers. Relative input costs explain the early development of the seed drill and the threshing machine. Inventive output also depended on the market for food. The overall level of patents issued was related to the level of population and to changing food prices.The output market for food was influencing invention through of population growth on the advance of farming technology.

Scholarship on African “underdevelopment,” its antecedents, manifestations, and consequences, is now limited in focus and method. This article suggests a broader approach and emphasizes insights that might come from combining aspects of economic anthropology with analysis of institutions. A modest case study then sketches some monetary perceptions and policies of Tanganyika's colonial bureaucracies (German and British) and their reception by Tanganyika's diverse population. Indigenous reaction to alien media was rational within a neo-classical tripartite demand-for-money framework. The combined consequences of all parties'actions for both the territory's “underdevelopment” and “under-growth” receive final but not definitive scrutiny in the last section.

One of the recent tendencies in the United States has been the movement away from private methods of finance to finance through government agencies, a trend that has been particularly noticeable during periods of national catastrophe such as wars and depressions. In these periods we have seen, in addition to other sources of government financing, the use of the War Finance Corporation during World War I and the use on a far larger scale of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Great Depression and World War II.

During World War II two thirds of a total expenditure for industrial facilities of approximately $25 billion was directly financed by the government. In contrast, during the three-year period of 1917–1919, only about one tenth of the $6 billion in new facilities under construction was directly financed by the government.

Never in history has man successfully invented a device, an instrument, a machine, or a structure without creating a demand for performance far beyond the capacity of the original design. The acceptance of an innovation starts a continuous stream of improvements in the product or in its manufacture that leads to larger, more powerful, or more efficient models; and the widespread diffusion of a product almost automatically implies the evolution of a broad range in the dimensions of serviceability. The increase in the size of the product is an important aspect of industrial growth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, very few sailing vessels of 300 tons were produced in American shipyards. When the clipper ships were finally outmoded, the largest were at least ten times that size. The first American-made steam engines before 1810 included some that were large for the time, around 100 horsepower. By 1865, engines of 1,000 horsepower were in use, and by 1880 the size had been increased to 4,000 horsepower.

There has been comparatively little research into regional prices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and historians have customarily relied upon indices of London's wholesale and contract prices to indicate the fluctuations and trends of British prices as a whole. Our knowledge of price movements, and especially of retail price movements, in other parts of the country is therefore scanty. It is not suggested that this situation may easily be altered, but evidence of bread prices in Glasgow at least may add further brush strokes to those which “supplied the first rough outlines on an otherwise blank canvas.”

The following bit of research has two purposes, one general and one specific. Its general purpose is to suggest how the three elements in its title arc linked together, and in doing this to connect more closely the work of historians, which has focused on entrepreneurship, with that of economists, which has centered around economic growth as measured in statistical aggregates. The specific purpose is to show how the organization of the German coal-mining industry in fact constituted one such connection between the economic activity of individuals and the industrial development of a nation.

As Fritz Redlich has had occasion to point out, business history is neither of American nor of recent vintage–that interest in company histories which began on the Continent early in the nineteenth century had by 1900 prompted at least one prominent German scholar to suggest how a study of business might be developed into an academic discipline. What was new in the United States was the term “business history,” and what is more relevant for my comments in this paper were the circumstances that led to its emergence as a special field and the effect that this separation has had on the relationship between business history and economic history.