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on Business, Economic and Financial History |
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Issue of 2010‒07‒03
eleven papers chosen by |
| By: | Salvador Calatayud (Departamento de Análisis Económico, Universidad de Valencia) |
| Abstract: | The role of the state in nineteenth-century Spanish economy has been very controversial and has generally received negative judgments. This article tries to evaluate the intervention in the regulation of rice cultivation. Justified against malaria, this regulation encountered great difficulties to be applied until it consolidated the new state apparatus after the liberal revolution, because of local resistance and administrative constraints. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the state introduced legislation that would live in time and was widely respected. Thus the state showed a certain autonomy from social interests and set up measures that had an impact on improving population health. |
| Keywords: | Agriculture, Agrarian politics, State building, Paddy fields |
| JEL: | N23 Q10 Q18 H70 |
| Date: | 2010–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:seh:wpaper:1001&r=his |
| By: | Fenske, James |
| Abstract: | Nigeria's Benin region was a major rubber producer in 1960. In 1921, however, the government abandoned the industry as a failure. I explain why rubber did not take hold before 1921. British conquest was motivated in part by the region's wild rubber resources. The government was unable to protect Benin's rubber forests from over-exploitation. Expatriate firms were reticent to invest in plantations, and private African plantations remained small. The colonial government promoted the development of ``communal'' plantations, but these suffered from labor scarcity, a weak state, limited information, and global competition. |
| Keywords: | Nigeria; Benin; rubber; development |
| JEL: | N57 O13 |
| Date: | 2010–06–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:23415&r=his |
| By: | Amendola, Nicola; Vecchi , Giovanni; Al Kiswani , Bilal |
| Abstract: | Despite the fact that in 2011 Italy will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its political unification, geographical disparities stand out as a prominent characteristic of the country. The paper estimates the trend of the cost-of-living differentials across regions in the half-century after the Second World War. We find that the North-South gap has steadily increased, from 10 percent in 1951 to almost 20 percent in recent years. The divergence in prices highlights the delay, possibly the failure, of Italy’s economic integration. Its cost, in terms of both foregone economic growth and distributive equity, is borne by the entire Italian society. |
| Keywords: | purchasing power parity; cost-of-living index; living standard; Balassa-Samuelson effect; economic integration. |
| JEL: | R10 E31 N94 N34 N14 |
| Date: | 2010–06–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:23486&r=his |
| By: | Osamu Saito; Tokihiko Settsu |
| Abstract: | This paper aims to offer new estimates of gainfully occupied workers in Japan between 1885 and 1940. The estimates are made by taking explicitly widespread farm-family by-employment into account, and then they will be allocated into the primary, secondary and tertiary (PST) sectors. With the new workforce statistics and revised estimates of net output in the tertiary sector for the same period, we would also like to examine the levels of differentials in average labour productivity between the three sectors. The paper will show that labour productivity differentials between agriculture and manufacturing in early stages of Japan's industrialisation were not as wide as both Gerschenkronian and dual structurist arguments tended to assume for late industrialisers. |
| Date: | 2010–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hst:ghsdps:gd10-143&r=his |
| By: | Garima Gupta; Avih Rastogi |
| Abstract: | The twenty-first century will be the century of knowledge, indeed the century of the intellect. A nation’s ability to translate knowledge into wealth and social good through innovations will determine its future. Thus innovations hold the key to the creation as well as processing of knowledge. Consequently issues of generation, evaluation, protection and exploitation of intellectual property would become critically important all over the world. Their analysis of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is presented in two sections: in the first they deal with the concept of intellectual property rights and the rationale behind them. In the second section, focus is on the intellectual property rights in the Indian context.[Working Paper No. 0040] |
| Keywords: | knowledge, wealth, social good, innovations,generation, evaluation, protection, exploitation |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:2602&r=his |
| By: | Ricardo Lozano Botache; José M. González Afanador; Diana M. Osma R |
| Abstract: | Los derechos de propiedad sobre la tierra todavía son objeto de estudio en el siglo XXI, aunque ya debiera ser un tema superado, desde México hasta Argentina para sólo mencionar a Latinoamérica, hay cuestiones de la tierra por resolver y disculpas para asumir actitudes al respecto; aquí se presenta una revisión sobre los cambios que han sucedido últimamente en Colombia, donde la propiedad privada se inició en la época de (o con la colonización) la colonia y se ha conservado en su esencia conceptual en la etapa republicana. Se han mantenido reglas de juego tanto formales como informales, aunque recientemente se percibe el reconocimiento del derecho de uso del bien productivo tierra como el real determinante del desarrollo, por encima de la noción clásica que daba esa característica al derecho de propiedad. La reforma agraria bajo los cánones ortodoxos de la repartición de la tierra, que no sucedió, ha sido redefinida por cambios institucionales hacia el mercado de tierras, primero asistida y luego liberada al juego de la oferta y la demanda, pero entendido que se requiere un marco riguroso y, ante todo, eficiente en asuntos como los sistemas de registro, catastro y una sólida convicción social de respeto a la propiedad privada En este texto se tratan los cambios desde la perspectiva neo-institucional. ABSTRACT: Property rights over land are still under consideration in the XXI century, although it should be a subject passed from Mexico to Argentina for only mentioning Latin America, there are issues of unresolved land and apologies to be assumed and attitudes towards it. Here there is a review of the changes that have recently happened in Colombia, where private property that began with the colony, has been preserved in the conceptual essence Republican period. Rules games have been kept in formal and informal fields, although it has been recently perceived recognition of the right to use the factual real productive land as the determinant of development, beyond the classical notion that gave the right of property ownership. Land reform under the orthodox canons of the distribution of land, which did not happen, is being redefined by institutional changes to the land market, first assisted and then released into the interplay of supply and demand, but understanding that is required rigorous framework for efficient and above all in matters such as registration systems, land and a strong social belief of respect for private property. The changes from neo institutional perspectives are managed in the text. |
| Date: | 2010–06–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000385:007145&r=his |
| By: | Aurora Gómez Galvarriato (CIDE); Cesar Guerrero-Luchtenberg (Universidad de Alicante) |
| Abstract: | Recent history gives us evidence of the different timing and results of the opening up of several economies. We present a model to explain this divergence. Accordingly with this evidence, we show that, provided the government prefers more competition than less competition irrespective of the .rms. nationality, essentially three concepts explain everything: The agent' degree of impatience, the gap between the domestic and the foreign technologies and the costs due to the political environment. In sharp contrast to the existing literature, we show that a temporal protectionism can be time consistent, and domestic firms adopt new technologies under it. |
| Keywords: | Temporal Protectionism, Time Consistency, Bankruptcies |
| JEL: | C72 F12 O14 |
| Date: | 2010–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ivi:wpasad:2010-03&r=his |
| By: | BEURAN, Monica; BRACK, Estelle |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of foreign banks' presence in Central and Eastern Europe's countries on their economic development and on the financial crisis they went through. We show that, despite a certain vulnerability of the domestic banking systems, the consequences of the opening of the banking markets to the foreign banks was globally positive. Thanks to local acquisitions by foreign investors, domestic banks have been recapitalized and transformed into effective and profitable banks with modern methods of risk management. Their access to international financial markets allowed the increase of credit supply and returned this supply less sensitive to domestic shocks. Without this opening the existing financing methods would not have been adequate to the economic development these countries knew the last years. The presence of foreign banks is so identified as a factor of stabilization. |
| Keywords: | Financial crisis contagion economic development regional integration foreign banks |
| JEL: | F23 E44 G21 |
| Date: | 2009–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:23476&r=his |
| By: | Labardin, Pierre |
| Abstract: | A partir d'archives d'entreprises, de manuels comptables, de coupures de presse spécialisée, d'archives d'associations et de thèses de droit anciennes, cette monographie revient sur l'histoire des entreprises, qui s'organisent aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles sans fonction comptable. Elle analyse ensuite comment les transformations du marché du travail rationalisent la comptabilité. |
| Keywords: | Comptabilité de gestion; Organisation de l'entreprise; Services comptables; |
| JEL: | M0 N01 M41 |
| Date: | 2010–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ner:dauphi:urn:hdl:123456789/4384&r=his |
| By: | Alejandrina Salcedo; Todd Schoellman; Michèle Tertilt |
| Abstract: | The size of the average American household has fallen dramatically -from six in 1850 to three in 2000. To explain this decline we model households as collections of roommates who share the costs of household public goods. If private goods are more income elastic than public goods, as we document in the paper, an increase in income endogenously leads to smaller households. We calibrate the model to match data from 2000. Changing incomes to their 1850 levels, we find that our mechanism can explain 37 percent of the observed reduction in the number of adults per household and 16 percent of the reduction in the number of children. |
| Keywords: | Household size, living arrangements, roommates, economies of scale, household public goods, fertility decline. |
| JEL: | D10 E10 J11 N30 O10 |
| Date: | 2010–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdm:wpaper:2010-07&r=his |
| By: | Édgard Moncayo Jiménez; Hernán Enríquez Sierra |
| Abstract: | Uno de los debates más animados de la teoría del desarrollo en los últimos decenios ha tenido lugar alrededor de las causas y tendencias de las disparidades en el nivel de ingreso, tanto entre países como entre las diferentes regiones que integran las economías nacionales. La pregunta crucial que da origen a la controversia es si, en el largo plazo, las brechas en los niveles de ingresos per cápita en los planos nacionales e internacional tienden a ampliarse o disminuir. |
| Date: | 2009–11–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000386:007155&r=his |