Search

We describe the formulation and development of a supply-chain optimisation model for Fletcher Challenge Paper Australasia (FCPA). This model, known as Paper Industry Value Optimisation Tool (PIVOT), is a large mixed integer program that finds an optimal allocation of supplier to mill, product to paper machine, and paper machine to customer, while at the same time modelling many of the supply chain details and nuances which are peculiar to FCPA. PIVOT has assisted FCPA in solving a number of strategic and tactical decision problems, and provided significant economic benefits for the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While first highlighted by Romer (J Econ Educ 25:49–66, 1994), economic history has only continued to become more integrated into the broader discipline. This paper utilizes a sample of recent articles in top Economics journals to help assess what characteristics economic history papers share and a sample of recent graduate syllabi to examine the role that a required economic history class can play more broadly in the training of economists. The samples confirm that economic history research utilizing a wide range of topics and tools is being published in top economics journals and taught in economic history classes. The findings suggest that economic history is a complement to the research of other fields and that a required economic history class offers an early applied course that could help students regardless of what field they go on to pursue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of four historical tropical storms on the Colonial Bank's operations in the British Caribbean between 1922 and 1927. By employing a high-frequency data set of bank transactions, this study reveals how these severe shocks influenced the banking activities of clients. The findings reveal a multifaceted and significant impact of tropical storm strikes on the banks' operations, particularly a surge in borrowing via overdrafts of current accounts. Moreover, the study reveals the multifaceted nature of such storms' impact on the bank's functionality, with affected branches demonstrating an uptick in deposits and savings as a strategy to mitigate funding shocks. The results of the econometric analysis indicate that the impact of such storms on banks' functionality during the early 20th century was significant and multidimensional. It highlights the critical role that the Colonial Bank plays in facilitating recovery from these devastating events and contributes to the existing literature by studying multiple shocks at different geographical locations and time frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Historian John Hiden once called pre-WWI Latvia "the Belgium of the East" due to its highly advanced manufacturing, serving the Russian market. The independent Latvian nation-state (1918–1940) lost this status together with the industrial equipment, evacuated in 1915–1916 to mainland Russia and never returned. Inter-war Latvia did attempt to "Denmarkize", i.e., to become an internationally important exporter of food and to re-industrialize. Both its economic success and growth performance are severely contested. According to Roses and Wolf (in: Broadberry S, O'Rourke KH (eds) The Cambridge economic history of modern Europe, vol 2. 1870 to the present. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, pp 183–207, 2010), Latvia's GDP per capita growth rate was the highest among the European countries in 1929–1938. According to the most authoritative expatriate Latvian account by Aizsilnieks (Latvijas saimniecības vēsture, 1914–1945. Daugava, Stockholm, 1968), the growth stagnated in the years of the authoritarian Karlis Ulmanis regime (1934–1940). Roses and Wolf estimates are indirect. Aizsilnieks grounds his conclusions in the methodologically outdated national income estimates from inter-war times. This paper resolves the controversy by providing direct supply-side time series of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1920–1939, based on a benchmark estimate of Latvia's GDP in 1935 by Norkus et al. (Cliometrica, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-022-00260-x, 2022). Main findings: The economic growth continued after 1934, but it was not Europe´s top growth performer in 1929–1938. However, in 1922–1938, its growth performance was the best, also due to a very low baseline after the extreme war-related economic destruction. The "Denmarkization" process was only partially successful because agricultural productivity remained low, and the re-industrialization was mainly import-substitution. We also did find that since 1936, Latvia's GDP per capita grew with substantial stagnation of the sectoral share of agriculture and a re-shift from services to manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Conquest of Quebec in 1760 was a key moment in Canadian history as it marked the beginning of a tense coexistence between French and English Canadians. Many argue that the Conquest had strong economic consequences in the form of the relative poverty of the French settlers. All the proposed mechanisms rely on a retreat from the market by French farmers. Using 171 years of wheat price data for Quebec City and Montreal, I test whether there are signs of this retreat and instead find the opposite: markets grew more integrated across regions. Additionally, over time, regional prices became better predicted by current prices elsewhere than by the lagged prices in the same region. By the 1830s, markets in Quebec were as well integrated as those in economies such as the USA, France, Britain and Germany. The evidence in this paper is consistent with recent empirical findings about Quebec's economic history, and so I argue that the case for the Conquest's initiation of the relative poverty of Quebec is non-existent as defined by conventional explanations. This does not exclude long-run consequences of the Conquest, but the correct answer must lie elsewhere than in conventional explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is everything good in political economy incorporated into modern graduate education in economics? With the transition of the art of political economy into the science of economics, there was a significant narrowing of graduate education curriculum. The prevailing technique in economics, a neoclassical framework focusing on formal empirics, gradually compressed artistic components of economics, including philosophical underpinnings, democratic justifiability, theoretical intuition, comparative institutional analysis, and political economy. Courses on the history of economic thought, which historically played a role in introducing graduate students to the complexities of the art of political economy, are now only offered as an elective. This paper argues, however, that there are still insights to be gleaned from studying the classics of political economy in graduate education. We highlight the tradeoff between theoretical cumulativeness and knowledge, arguing that significant insights from historical works of political economy are often absent in contemporary technical expositions of economics. We explore examples of useful knowledge in political economy that was lost in the transition away from the art of political economy. To remain an operationally valid social science, economists should reintroduce the artistic elements of political economy into the graduate training of economists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many mainstream schools of economics argue that work is a burden, while nonmainstream schools argue that this might not be entirely true. This paper aims to reconcile this difference by suggesting that individuals will balance income and leisure only after the fixed expense for their current living standard is met. Three applications show that the above explanation can reconcile different historical perspectives, explain various discrepancies about labor supply between neoclassical theory predictions and empirical findings, and reconcile the different interpretations about lottery winners' labor supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the current situation and the historical development of Austrian Economics in Madrid. We will analyse the formation of this School as the result of the thesis defended by Joaquín Reig Albiol in the late fifties and the current economic debate surrounding the fractional reserve and other complex issues. In this half-century tour, we will explore three different generations of Austrian economists in Spain, whilst demonstrating that a distinct branch of the Austrian School is today live and well in Madrid. Eventually, we will discover how the Spanish Austrian economists have applied praxeology to contemporary political and economic problems and conclude that a vigorous and growing economic school of thought exists in Madrid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Max Weber's intellectual relationship to the first generations of the Austrian School. Challenging his portrayal as a one-sided historicist, the paper reconstructs Weber's intense involvement with the Viennese economists from the 1890s to his passing in 1920 and his efforts to overcome the fronts left behind by the Methodenstreit. Section 2 discusses a number of necessary conditions for declaring a scholarly community a "school". Section 3 systematizes the multiple biographical connections, especially Weber's nexus to Friedrich von Wieser and Joseph Schumpeter. Section 4 focuses on the research program of Social Economics during the first decades of the twentieth century as the "irenic formula" for the post-Methodenstreit hostilities. Within Social Economics, economic sociology constitutes an "intermediary" layer between economic theory and economic history, addressing the institutional properties of the framework surrounding the processes of human action and exchange. Depending on the relative importance and qualifying power of economic sociology vis-à-vis economic theory, the paper distinguishes two varieties of Social Economics, a "universalist" and an "institutionalist" one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abundance of domesticable mammals in Eurasia facilitated its early transition from hunter–gatherer to agricultural economies, with dramatic consequences for human history. This paper empirically examines the origins of these biogeographical advantages and finds that the extinction of large mammals during the past 100,000 years was a decisive force in the evolution of mammal domestication. In Eurasia's domestication cradles, humans had sufficient incentives to continually practice herd management as a hunting strategy to prevent the depletion of their vital common resources. These strategies changed some targeted species and made them more receptive to human domination. The absence of these conditions (human incentive and animal receptivity) in other regions resulted in the paucity of domestication. The paper presents the most comprehensive empirical analysis of the origins of animal domestication and the roots of global inequalities to date and unearths a critical channel for the influence of deep history on comparative economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interwar independent Republic of Latvia was among the first ten pioneering states, where a national statistical office published official estimates of total output (1934–1936). Paradoxically, however, Latvia is the Baltic country with the most disputed interwar economic growth performance. According to the authoritative account of Roses and Wolf in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern History (2010), Latvia's GDP per capita growth rate was the highest among European countries in 1929–1938. It impressively ranked number ten according to GDP per capita next to Sweden, France, and Norway. However, according to Norkus and Markevičiūtė (in Cliometrica 15:565–674, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-020-00216-z), it only surpassed Southern European countries, and its growth performance was mediocre. Both these contradictory estimates are derived by indirect methods. This paper contributes to the resolution of this controversy, directly estimating Latvia's GDP in 1935 within the SNA 2008 framework, providing gross value-added calculation for 20 ISIC industries at basic and at market (purchasers') prices. It provides a more fine-grained analysis of the composition of Latvia's total output in comparison with interwar historical national accounts, where only 11 industries were distinguished. This estimate provides the benchmark for future research on Latvia's interwar economic growth performance. Converting our estimates into monetary units, used in the Maddison Project Database, we assess Latvia's position in the international GDPpc ranking, coming to conclusions that dovetail with Norkus and Markevičiūtė (2021) findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of economic uncertainty on growth performance of Pakistan through developing a small macroeconomic model. The GARCH method has been used for construction of economic uncertainty variables related to macroeconomic policies. The structural outcomes clearly indicate that economic policy uncertainty affects negatively on real and nominal sectors of Pakistan. The forecasting of model and different policy uncertainty simulation shocks also indicated that an adjustment in economic policies due to change of policy objectives create uncertain environment in country, which not only deteriorates the investment climate of country, it also affects the economic growth. Our study concludes that economic uncertainty not only reduces the current investment and economic growth, it also affects the future decision of investment and economic growth. This study suggests that sustainable and steady economic policies always reduce economic uncertainty and promote the confidence of economic agents, which help in achieving the targets of investment, trade and economic growth. Our study also maintains the predictability and reliability of government policies for the accomplishment of macroeconomic goals and economic development of country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper estimates dynamic effects of pandemics on GDP per capita with local projections, controlling for the effects of wars and weather conditions, using a novel dataset that covers 33 countries and stretches back to the thirteenth century. On average, pandemics are found to have prolonged and highly statistically significant effects on GDP per capita—a pandemic killing 1% of the population tends to increase GDP per capita by approx. 0.3% after about 20 years. The study of a more detailed dataset available for the UK reveals that this results mainly from an increase in per capita land and a disproportionate impact of pandemics on low-productivity workers, while monetary expansion, institutional change and innovation could also play some role. At the same time, the effects of pandemics are found to vary with scale and across time and countries, with positive effects present following the Black Death and the Spanish flu pandemics, especially in Northern Europe. This suggests that only the largest and most unexpected pandemics have a positive impact on income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstarct: In this short contribution, I summarize the four papers that comprise the symposium on Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective and then address several themes that they raise. Specifically, I discuss the roles of capital and capital goods, human capital, adjustment costs after monetary shocks, W. H. Hutt's understanding of idleness in the labor market, and the ways in which Austrian macroeconomic concepts can be deployed in doing economic history. I argue that intertemporal discoordination remains the key concept in Austrian macroeconomics and encourage present and future scholars to explore the coordinating role of capital and to challenge the institutional and historical contingencies that have defined the canonical Austrian business cycle theory story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and gross domestic product in the Middle East and North Africa region using World Bank data covering the period 1980 to 2010 on the eve of the Arab Spring. Unlike extant studies using parametric models, the results provide evidence against the postulated inverted-U shaped relationship between pollution and the level of economic development. Using a non-parametric model, new evidence is found against the existence of a carbon Environmental Kuznets Curve in contrast to previous studies on the region. The paper provides a cautionary note against the use of parametric models to draw policy implications about the trade-off (or lack thereof) between environmental quality and the level of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of retailing has become an area of growing scholarly interest over the last few decades, with publications mainly concerning the national historiography of retail and wholesaling. On the other hand, although the retail sector is considered to be one of the most historically significant sectors of the Greek economy, the economic history of the Greek retail industry remains a notoriously underdeveloped area of inquiry and, as such, is on the margins of economic and social studies in Greek historiography. In this paper, we, attempt to provide a first concise (and certainly not exhaustive) analysis of the historical development of the Greek retail sector from the nineteenth century to the present (in circa) day. Specifically, we aim to analyse the evolution of the Greek retail trade to assess the spatial and social impacts associated with establishing and operating "new forms" of commerce. The focus is on the sectoral and organisational restructuring of the retail trade with the changes in the standards of the spatial location, which relate to the establishment and operation of retail businesses. Students and scholars of the history of retailing would benefit from this worthwhile exercise which for the first time provides a first overview of the historical development of the Greek retail sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Bronze Age Mediterranean, trade was a key mechanism that defined the era's political, social, and economic dynamism. This paper reviews recent methodological and empirical developments in the study of trade in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the Late Bronze Age. The complexity of the relevant evidence presents nontrivial interpretative challenges, and a variety of schools of thought concerning the methods and approaches best suited for enlightening economic exchange through the study of archaeological remains co-exist. New insights based on empirical study of archaeological evidence have primarily coalesced around topics that have long been central to the study of trade, especially the sources and destinations of metal resources and the distribution of ceramic containers and their contents. Developing areas of emphasis, such as the roles of merchants and traders, have simultaneously emerged. Both novel methods and recent empirical insights highlight the difficulty inherent in attempts to relate artifacts to commercial exchange due to the variety of human and material mobilities apparent in the archaeological record. The path forward for understanding Bronze Age trade economies will require carefully tailoring research questions that may be answered in concrete ways with the evidence available and developing interpretative frameworks that can accommodate both bottom-up views emphasizing individual agency and generalizing models that facilitate comparison through space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syrian refugee women face many obstacles when accessing health services in host countries that are influenced by various cultural, structural, and practical factors. This paper is based on critical ethnographic research undertaken in Canada, to explore Syrian refugee women migration experiences. Also, we aim at critically examining how the intersection of gender, trauma, and violence, and the political and economic conditions of Syrian refugee women shapes their everyday lives and health. The study also investigates the strategies and practices by which Syrian refugee women are currently addressing their healthcare needs and the models of care that are suggested for meeting their physical and mental health needs. Findings show that these women experienced constant worries, hardship, vulnerability, and intrusion of dignity. These experiences and challenges were aggravated by the structure of the Canadian social and healthcare system. This study offers a better understanding of the impact of migration and trauma on Syrian refugee women's roles, responsibilities, gender dynamics, and interaction with Ontario's healthcare system to improve interaction and outcomes. Healthcare models should address these challenges among Syrian refugee families in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The positive contribution of women’s education to the economy and society has long been known in many countries, particularly in developing countries, to attract more attention. A large number of literatures on women’s education clearly suggest that educating a woman is equivalent to educating a family and that this woman is better educated than her counterparts, men, in many respects. The low level of education of women in Muslim countries, most of which are in developing countries. The increase in the level of education depends on the elimination of gender inequalities in education. Muslim countries must use all their resources to achieve their economic development goals. Women’s participation in the economy is a major economic resource that is not widely used in Muslim countries. The literature (Dollar and Garti in Gender inequality, income, and growth: are good times good for women? World Bank Working Paper, 21-2 1999; Barro in The Contribution of Human and Social Capital to Sustained Economic Growth and Well Being, Canada Government, Portage 2001; Schltz 2002; Klasen 2002; Knowles et al. in Oxf. Econ. Pap. 54 118-149 2002) suggests that gender equality has a positive effect on economic growth. Taking into account Muslim countries, it can reasonably be argued that the rate of the gender effect on economic growth is higher in developing countries. This paper analyzes the impact of gender inequality in education on economic growth for tunisia will be explored, using econometric techniques. The document will take into account all variables of primary school graduation, obtaining a high school diploma, obtaining a high school diploma and obtaining a University degree with economic growth will be examined in detail for the period 1970-2009. At this level Women’s contribution to the economy is threefold. The first is that the increase in the level of human capital, as a result, decrease the fertility rate of women. The second argument is that the infant mortality rate could decrease by decreasing the fertility rate of women. Third, raising the level of education of women can affect the level of education of the next generation positively. In this context, in order to understand the long-term relationships between these variables, i.e. gender inequality in education and economic growth, a co-integration approach will be applied. The empirical results show that there is a long-term relationship between these variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifiable, spatially-resolved, large-scale evidence about traditional food storage facilities is extremely rare, and yet highly insightful for researchers across subjects such as human ecology, anthropology, agronomy, archaeology and economic history. This paper takes advantage of some unusually detailed French colonial era records of cereal storage and agro-pastoral practice in 19th century central Algeria that inventory the underground food stores of different sedentary and nomadic tribes at a moment of colonial confrontation in which these stores were central to ecological and political resilience. We consider how different aspects of these food stores relate to environmental, social and economic variables across the study area. The overall results suggest important north-south trends in agro-pastoral lifestyle and storage practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Menger made wants and goods the center of economic analysis. This paper locates his theory of wants and goods in the history of economic ideas, identifying major influences from the German subjective-value tradition of the 19th century. Our survey of select German economists prior to 1871 – Hufeland, Storch, Rau, Hermann, Mischler, Stein and Schäffle – discovers insights that highlight the subjective and processual nature of the wants-goods nexus, as does Menger's approach. Menger's process approach to economics had several precursors – the historical record is much more nuanced than previously recognized. Menger combined existing ideas on wants and goods into a novel, more coherent and productive framework. He portrayed human wants and the desire to satisfy them as the driving force propelling economic processes. Menger's theory about wants and goods provided the foundations for his theory of subjective value. He showed how the simple idea that people value goods in light of their wants is the key to the most fundamental problems of economic theory, including value, price formation, production, distribution and economic development, and he applied this insight to explain complex economic processes in modern market economies. Menger's work constitutes a major synthesis that advances earlier ideas (especially of Hermann, Mischler and Schäffle) on wants, goods and their interplay, and his focus upon complementarities of consumer goods constitutes yet a further advancement on German economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-standing item of interest in Canadian economic history is the "agricultural crisis" that apparently plagued the large colony of Quebec during the first half of the nineteenth century. One particularly resilient explanation of the crisis claims that cultural conservatism made the colony's French-Canadian population reluctant to embrace modern farming techniques developed in Britain and the US. This has been supported through comparisons with the English farmers in the colony. Using data from the census of Quebec in 1851, this paper shows that there was no such reluctance. French-Canadian farmers were no less likely to adopt "scientific" farming techniques than English-Canadian farmers in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an original microeconomic database with information for around 200,000 individuals, this paper creates new estimates of internal migrations in Spain in a key moment of its economic history. Our analysis shows that internal migrations were not a linear process including both periods of stagnation and also rapid growth, and that the 1850s were a decade of surprising high mobility in the absence of modern transportation. We also conclude that the rise in mobility was geographically asymmetrical with traditional urban centres losing ground against the rise of Madrid and Barcelona. The modernisation of the country also had significant social impacts with the migratory gender gap being significantly reduced prior to 1870. An analysis of the determinants of internal migrations suggests that traditional push and pull factors described by the literature in the early twentieth century seem to be also behind the early migrations of the mid-nineteenth century. The modernisation of the country provided new opportunities in urban areas that, combined with falling transport and information costs, created the perfect conditions for the 'democratisation' of long-distance migrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1790 to 1891, the United States prevented foreign authors from obtaining domestic copyright protection, implicitly subsidizing a domestic reprinting industry. With foreign works a "free" and unprotected resource, American publishers created a system of voluntary norms, known as "trade courtesy" to create and enforce pseudo-property rights in uncopyrighted foreign works, simulating the effects of legal copyright protection. This paper analyzes this system using the Bloomington School's institutional design principles to understand its effectiveness and pitfalls in managing the commons of unprotected foreign works in nineteenth Century America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier investigations have concentrated on the effect of export expansion on economic growth while ignoring the importance of the stability of such relationship. This paper re-investigates empirically the export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis for five countries in the MENA region: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey, using the Granger causality technique. This study covers the sample period from 1980:Q1 to 2012:Q4. With the full sample, we find evidence supporting the ELG hypothesis only in Jordan, Morocco, and Turkey. Nonetheless, our time-varying Granger causality results have significantly validated the evidence of instability of the ELG hypothesis in these MENA countries. Therefore, changes in policies and regulations to improve the export sector of these countries will not ultimately pay off in terms of achieving high rates of stable economic growth in these countries. Policymakers in these countries should search for the alternative catalyst of growth to continuously as well as to effectively promote long-term economic growth in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies whether a drought in 1788 affected the outbreak of peasant revolts during the French Revolution. I construct a community-level data set with information on local drought severity and peasant uprisings in 1789. Communities with severe drought conditions more often experienced peasant revolts against the feudal system. Then, I investigate a mechanism through which drought may have affected peasant revolts. Those more affected by the drought had higher demand for institutional change as expressed in the lists of grievances. The results provide evidence on specific ways in which the drought of 1788 impacted the French Revolution, a milestone in the democratization of Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent stream of literature argues that economic history is expanding its aim of looking for the historical roots of current outcomes (persistence studies) and that it is increasingly integrating with economics. This paper tests these claims with a new database of about 2500 articles published from 2001 to 2018 in the top five economic history journals and in eight leading economics journals. Our results do not confirm this optimistic narrative. Despite a growing interest by economists, economic history and a fortiori persistence studies are still marginal in economics journals. Furthermore, substantial differences between articles in the two groups of outlets are visible. Only a few authors have published in both economics and economic history journals. Publishing in the top five economics journals yields more citations than in top-field journals, but this is not necessarily true for other prestigious economics journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the dynamics of child and household poverty in rural Ethiopia using three rounds of household survey and qualitative data collected by Young Lives, a longitudinal study of child poverty. It uses a mixed-method taxonomy of poverty to classify children and their households into four groups, analyse their movements in and out of poverty, and explore the underlying factors. The final section of the paper uses qualitative case studies to explore child welfare dynamics in more detail, looking at the interplay between the progress or decline of households and that of children within those households. It concludes that while the percentage of poor households within this sample reduced from 50 to 20 % between rounds 1 and 3 (2002-2009), these changes were not always beneficial to children and did not reach nearly 1 in 10 households classified as ultra-poor. A deepened understanding of those changes, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, is deemed crucial in post-2015 millennium development goal discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates the measurement of transient poverty when each person's welfare level fluctuates due to exogenous risk. The paper namely characterizes the sensitivity of transient/chronic poverty decomposition with respect to the poverty line and to the expected welfare level so that the decomposition analysis will be based on solid theoretical foundations and be robust empirically. Theoretical results show that poverty measures associated with prudent risk preferences perform better than other measures in assuring that the value of transient poverty increases with the depth of chronic poverty and that the decomposition is not highly sensitive to the poverty line. Poverty measures such as those associated with constant relative risk aversion are thus superior to popular Foster–Greer–Thorbecke (FGT) measures such as headcount, poverty gap, and squared poverty gap indices. These theoretical arguments are confirmed empirically by the application of the decomposition to a two-period household panel dataset from rural Pakistan. The relative magnitudes of transient versus chronic poverty are more robust to changes in the poverty line when poverty measures associated with constant relative risk aversion are used than when FGT poverty measures are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contrasts different interpretations of the creation of the Bank of France. I argue that the Bank of France was the product of rent-seeking behavior rather than the pursuit of public interest, as is commonly supposed. I explain how the changing institutional constraints faced by both politicians and bankers can account for changes in France's monetary constitution. The creation of the Bank in 1800 followed the fall of the Directory and the establishment of Napoléon's autocratic regime. I argue that as parliamentarism and the separation of powers were weakened by Napoléon, the cost of establishing and maintaining a monopoly privilege in banking evaporated and the creation of the Bank of France became more likely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women’s empowerment is an intrinsic human rights goal that has implications for the health and well-being of women and their children. Poor measurement hampers current research efforts, and improving empowerment measurement is a frequently identified research priority. However, a discussion of specific steps researchers can take to improve upon common measurement practices is lacking. The purpose of this paper is to provide quantitative researchers recommendations to measure women’s empowerment in a theory-based, precise, and comprehensive way. This paper reviewed key theoretical concepts of women’s empowerment and critically reviewed common measurement approaches. Three broad recommendations for measuring empowerment emerged from this critical review, and specific suggestions to meet these recommendations are discussed. First, researchers should draw upon theory to construct measurement models (e.g., using theory to construct dimensions of empowerment and selection of indicators). Second, researchers should use analytic methods that minimize implicit judgments and bias (e.g., not classifying women as empowered using specific criteria). Third, researchers should collect comprehensive empowerment information (e.g., supplementing quantitative measures with qualitative interviews to learn how and why changes took place). Measuring empowerment poses a number of challenges, and this review provides researchers suggestions to improve upon common measurement practices. Improved measurement will strengthen research efforts on the causes and consequences of poor empowerment, which has the potential to improve the well-being of women and their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two centuries, taxation has not only increased dramatically in level and volume; its structure has also changed: from a heavy reliance on customs revenue in the early nineteenth century to a stronger emphasis on income taxation in the twentieth. A common explanation for this development is the spread of democracy, which supposedly increases redistribution and the size of government. This paper argues that the effect of democratization on taxation depends on the distribution of tax preferences in society. These preferences are not uniform: rural farmers prefer different policies than urban workers. Thus, the impact of democratization varies depending on the urbanization rate. The paper uses a novel dataset providing data on government tax revenue in thirty-one countries in Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—from as far back as 1800 up to the present day—in order to evaluate the conditional impact of democratization on tax structure. The results show that democracy decreases property taxes in rural countries but instead increases income taxes and decreases excise and consumption taxes in more urbanized states. These results are robust to different estimation methods, a number of control variables, such as interstate warfare, and to alternative measurements of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, African economies have embarked on financial sector reforms. However, the empirical implications of these reforms have been divergent. This paper investigates the impact of financial development on Economic growth using time series data in Cameroon. This investigation was carried out using three common indicators of financial development (broad money, deposit/GDP and domestic credit to private sector). Using the Auto Regressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) technique of estimation, it was discovered that there exist a short-run positive relationship between monetary mass (M2), government expenditure and economic growth, a short run negative relationship between bank deposits, private investment and economic growth equally exists. However in the long run, all indicators of financial development show a positive and significant impact on economic growth. This paper thus confirms the existence of a positive and long-term impact of all the indicators of financial development on economic growth through bound test. It is therefore proposed that the financial reforms in Cameroon should be pushed forward in order to boost the development of the financial sector thus an increase in its role on economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did France experience the demographic transition first? This question remains one of the greatest puzzles of economics, demography, and economic history. The French pattern is hard to reconcile with elucidations of the process as found in other countries. The present analysis goes back to the roots of the process and offers novel ways of explaining why people started to control their fertility in France and how they did so. In this paper, I track the evolution of marriage patterns to a point before the premises of the demographic transition. I identify two distinct phases. Next, I rely on exploratory methods to classify French counties based on their discriminatory features. Five profiles emerge. I discuss these profiles through the lens of the French Revolution, one of the greatest events that ever occurred in French history, which irretrievably altered its society. In particular, the results show that the fertility transition was not as linear, but more complex than previous research had argued. They show the importance of accounting for cultural factors and for individuals' predispositions to adapt more or less quickly to societal changes. Yet cultural factors are not all. They can help to explain the timing of the transition and the choice of methods used to control fertility, but modernity and gender equality are also needed to describe the mechanisms in play behind the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of Canadian economic history, French-Canadians (who composed more than a quarter of the country's population) had living standards inferior to those of English-Canadians. This was true even within the province of Quebec, where the French-Canadians constituted a majority. Today, no significant gap remains in Quebec. Surprisingly however, the question of when the gap started to disappeared remains unanswered. Most of the attention has been dedicated to the long-available post-1970 census data, which show rapid convergence. However, it is unknown whether the convergence started before 1970. In this paper, we use more recently uncovered data from the censuses between 1901 and 1951 to provide such an answer. We find that there was convergence from 1901 to 1921, a reversal from 1921 to 1941 and a recovery between 1941 and 1951 that extended to 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates a well-known approach from the economic history literature that uses grain prices to shed light on interest rates. Although this method has been applied in influential work starting with McCloskey and Nash (Am Econ Rev 74:174–187, 1984) and has potentially wide applicability in situations where interest rates are not available, this paper provides the first analysis of how well the storage cost approach captures actual capital market performance on a number of different dimensions. Using matched data on bank interest rates and grain prices for early 19th century U.S. regions, we find that the storage cost approach is useful for quantifying the performance of capital markets. The storage cost approach captures well regional differences in market performance implied by bank rates data, in terms of both the average interest rates and capital market integration. Moreover, the results are stronger than interest rate figures derived from the bills of exchange rates. The paper also assesses the storage cost approach's robustness to measurement error, incomplete information, outliers, and other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing appeal of the long-run perspective among economists and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Conrad and Meyer article (1958), which marked the official beginning of the Cliometric Revolution, have attracted a lot of interest on economic history. This paper explores the long-term development of economic history by analysing all the 6516 articles published in the top five international journals (Economic History Review, Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, European Review of Economic History and Cliometrica). Our main results are that the Cliometric Revolution took quite a long time to fully display its effects. We show that the conventional wisdom on the current state of the discipline seems a bit too optimistic. Economic history does not seem to be neither more comparative nor more focussed on peripheral countries. The historical periods studied do not change considerably, and the relevance of different topics did not change univocally. Most articles use some econometrics but only a minority feature advanced techniques. Economic history is indeed becoming more democratic, but its boundaries remain limited to the most advanced countries. Articles by authors from Continental Europe increased substantially, while that of North American declined. This change may be the harbinger of a new divergence between the two shores of the Atlantic, possibly related to the rise of a new paradigm, but it is too early to tell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political regimes are stable most years, but sometimes they jump. The stable years are periods of political status-quo equilibrium. To break a status quo requires a triggering event. The paper is an attempt to identify and classify what close observers at the time thought were the triggering events in a sample of 262 larger regime changes between 1960 and 2015 in 170 countries. The sample consists of all changes in the Polity index with a numerical rating above 3 (i.e. of 4 or more). The source for the triggering events is country-relevant articles in The Economist. Triggering events are classified in a (2 × 2) table with four cells: domestic political (DP), domestic economic (DE), external political (XP), and external economic (XE), which remains empty. By far the most common is DP, but the domestic political events prove to be very different. Thus, most jumps are exogenous in the perspective of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in economic history has challenged a strict Malthusian depiction of preindustrial European economies, highlighting 'efflorescences', 'Smithian' and 'growth recurring' episodes. Do these defining concepts apply to preindustrial Spain? In this paper, we carry out new yearly estimates of output and population for over half-a millennium. We find that our estimates of agricultural output on the basis of tithes largely confirm those obtained using a demand function approach supporting its use in the absence of direct information. We show that, although levels of output per head in the early nineteenth century were not much different from those in the eve of the Black Death, preindustrial Spain was far from stagnant. Phases of simultaneous per capita output and population expansion and shrinkage alternated, lending support to the recurring growth and frontier economy hypotheses. A long phase of sustained growth and lower inequality collapsed in the 1570s and gave way to another one of sluggish growth and higher inequality. As an alternative to a Malthusian interpretation, we hypothesise that, in preindustrial Spain, growth and decline are largely explained by individual and collective economic decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the dynamics responsible for changing Kampala city and the implications of these dynamics for an alternative urban policy framework. The paper is motivated by the paucity of information on the social-economic and political dynamics that contribute to Kampala's urbanisation and the resultant lack of an appropriate policy framework to guide the development trajectory in the Ugandan capital. It argues that the conditions that have allowed the situation to exist have serious policy implications, which require the need for an integrated policy framework that can be used to effectively prevent Kampala's unplanned urbanisation while promoting planned urbanisation. This paper, therefore, focuses on the informal dynamics explaining Kampala's urbanisation from 1990 to 2013 and their policy implications. The sample consisted of 24 purposively selected key informants and 720 city residents selected using multistage sampling. Data was collected using interviews, focus group discussions and questionnaires. Qualitative data was analysed using narrative and thematic techniques, complemented by the descriptive method. Factor analysis was used to analyse quantitative data. The findings explain Kampala's unplanned urbanisation during the period 1990-2013 including unofficial administrative dynamics; unofficial political influence; political unrest caused by internal and regional civil wars; the city's attractiveness to jobseekers, jobmakers and migrants from war-ravaged areas; and rural-urban migration and underdevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesotho is an inland country striving to improve its economy. Accessible education is perceived as an effective approach to economic growth. Over the years, various projects were commenced to improve Lesotho's basic education provision. However, the progress is not satisfactory or stable. This paper argues for systemic thinking and adopts Warfield's interactive management to identify the difficulties in Lesotho's education projects. Interactive management can help stakeholders to identify system elements, structure the relationship between systems elements and produce a diagraph representing the system in question. The core mechanism of interactive management is a binary matrix which can infer the existence of a relationship between system elements, provided that the relationship is transitive. Four root problems were identified through the interactive management process: 'board members not educated', 'poor service delivery by the Ministry of Education and Training to teachers', 'food insecurity' and 'reduced and standardisation of school fees at post primary schools'. The developed model demonstrates how system elements are interconnected. The model has potential to be used as a starting point for the Lesotho government to manage on its basic education problems through the identified root causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a Federal Reserve reaction function which relates policy intentions to forecasts of policy objectives. Pre- and postpresidential election estimates of this reaction function for the post-Accord period of 1953-1984 suggest two conclusions: (1) the Federal Reserve reacts differently to economic conditions in the pre- and postelection biennia and (2) these differences in Fed behavior are not likely the result of partisan political influence, but rather the result of self-restraint by the Fed during preelection periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the outcome of the efforts to economically catch up during the so-called development era in French-speaking West Africa. An attempt is made to measure and discuss key elements of social capability over the period 1930–1980 in Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal following Moses Abramovitz' interpretation of social capability. The paper distinguishes between four elements of social capability: degree of structural transformation, social and economic inclusion, the state's autonomy, and its accountability. We find that there was significant but uneven progress in social capability in both countries during the development era. Despite their differences in economic performance, both countries confronted fundamental shared challenges. Most notably, our analysis highlights how persistent lack of broad-based access to economic opportunities played a significant role in disrupting sustained economic and social progress in the two countries. This gives an opportunity to reflect on similarities and differences between the development era and the recent African growth phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization is increasingly a driving force behind vibrant economies around the world. This paper discusses the impact of globalization and natural resources on economic growth from 1970 to 2014 in Pakistan. Based on an auto-regressive distributive lag (ARDL) model, the paper infers that globalization promotes economic growth in Pakistan. Natural resources also contribute to economic growth, as the causality results suggest bi-directional causality between globalization and use of natural resources. Policy implications are that countries should emphasize security, increase exports, encourage technological strength, and increase its intellectual management capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European countries need to expand employment among older individuals. Many papers have examined this issue from different angles. However, very few seem to have considered its gender dimension properly, despite evidence that lifting the overall senior employment rate requires significantly raising that of women older than 50. The key issue examined by this paper is whether employers are willing to employ more older workers, in particular older women. The answer depends to a large extent on the ratio of older individuals' productivity to their cost to employers. To address this question we tap into a unique firm-level panel of Belgian data to produce robust evidence on the causal effect of age/gender on productivity and labour costs. We take advantage of the panel structure to identify age/gender-related differences from within-firm variation. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production function estimation literature, we address the problem of endogeneity of the age/gender mix, using a structural production function estimator (Olley and Pakes in Econometrica 64(6):1263-1297, ; Levinsohn and Petrin in Rev Econ Stud 70(2):317-341, ) alongside IV-GMM methods where lagged value of labour inputs are used as instruments. Our results indicate a small negative impact of larger shares of older men on the productivity-labour cost ratio. An increment of 10%-points of in their share causes a 0.17-0.69%-point contraction. However, the main result is that the equivalent handicap with older women is larger, ranging from 1.3 to 2.0%-points. This is not good news for older women's employability. And the vast services industry does not seem to offer working conditions that mitigate older women's disadvantage, on the contrary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the geopolitical overlay that is shaping dynamic hydropolitical interactions of the Harirud River Basin, which is a basin that spans Afghanistan, Iran and Turkmenistan. This paper argues that the control and capture of water resources are not solely for economic development but rather for geopolitical reasons that serve the security interests of the actors involved, particularly outside-basin powers like the US and India. The Afghan Government similarly views dams as symbols of nation-building and a way of staying in power. In the absence of a lasting trilateral agreement, the existing nature of the geopolitical dynamics of the basin has led upstream Afghanistan and downstream Iran and Turkmenistan to unilaterally establish their rights to control the “rules of the game”. This paper suggests that sustainable solutions will not be reached unless the geopolitical nature of the basin and outside interventions can center on a normative understanding of the regional interests, identities, and commonalities of all the riparian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the dynamics of volatility in the stock market using competing univariate GARCH specifications. Moreover, it provides a study of the pairwise correlation pattern of stock returns for a wide range of Saudi Arabian insurance business lines by using a dynamic DCC-GARCH model. Our results show that volatility responds asymmetrically to shocks with a persistence of variance in the stock return data, supporting the presence of irrational behaviour as well as the effectiveness of a cross-market diversification strategy. Finally, we reach a point at which, between every two-business line stock returns, there is a dynamic conditional correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of urban decay in Hong Kong is getting worse recently; therefore, the importance of urban renewal in improving the physical environment conditions and the living standards of the citizens is widely recognized in the territory. However, it is not an easy task for the Hong Kong Government to prepare welcome urban renewal proposals because the citizens, professionals and other concerned parties have their own expectations which are difficult to be addressed all at the same time. Although it is impossible to satisfy all stakeholders concerning urban renewal, it is preferable to have proposals conforming to the interests of the majority and beneficial to the present and future generations. This paper adopts the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to work out the most sustainable design proposal for an area undergoing urban renewal. AHP is a robust multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method for solving social, governmental and corporate decision problems. Since there is a lack of published papers demonstrating a systematic and effective way for urban renewal proposal assessment, this paper attempts to fill this gap with the help of AHP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the end of the Civil War to the onset of the Great War, the United States experienced an unprecedented increase in commitment rates for mental asylums. Historians and sociologists often explain this increase by noting that public sentiment called for widespread involuntary institutionalization to avoid the supposed threat of insanity to social well-being. However, that explanation neglects expanding rent seeking within psychiatry and the broader medical field over the same period. In this paper, we argue that stronger political influence from mental healthcare providers contributed significantly to the rise in institutionalization. We test our claim empirically with reference to the catalog of medical regulations from 1870 to 1910, as well as primary sources documenting rates of insanity at the state level. Our findings provide an alternative explanation for the historical rise in US institutionalizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit card debt stands at over $1 trillion in the US and grows continuously. Scholars have argued that high (and growing) levels of credit card debt are attributable in part to rising economic vulnerabilities, combined with a thinning public safety net, credit cards being increasingly employed to make ends meet in this context. This paper extends this line of work by stressing that individuals and households do not rely on their credit cards only to mitigate their own financial hardships, but also those experienced by their non-coresidential kin members. More specifically, building on the notion that kin networks can constitute a source of negative social capital, we argue that individuals often accumulate credit card debt as they attempt to provide monetary assistance to their relatives in need. We also show that this effect is particularly strong in lower-income groups and in African American communities, in which need levels are especially high. Based on random and fixed effects analyses of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, these insights extend scholarship on both kin networks of support and the sources of credit card debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]