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The desirability of politically creating currency unions among otherwise sovereign states is an ongoing debate. The benefits of the U.S. currency union and the benefits of other politically manufactured currency unions are assumed to be obvious, namely a reduction in monetary instability and exchange rate transaction costs within the union thereby stimulating long-run economic growth. Price indices, exchange rates and market-generated transaction data from 1748 through 1811 are used to determine when the market moved from state currencies to the U.S. dollar and to assess the non-wartime performance of prices, exchange rates, and purchasing power parity before versus this transition. The British North American colonies were the first modern western economies to experiment with large-scale government issuance of flat paper money. Colonial legislatures backed their paper money by linking it not to specie but to future taxes and mortgage payments designed to withdraw it from circulation in a timely fashion. The only continuous data for evaluating colonial/state monetary performance are price indices. Stability of prices is the hallmark of a well-managed monetary regime. New issues of state currency were constitutionally prohibited after 1787 and enough old state currency would be taken out of circulation through tax redemption by the early 1790s that the paper-money medium fell to banknotes by default.

The author draws attention to the almost contemporaneous contribution of Marvin Frankel (1962), 'The Production Function in Allocation and Growth: A Synthesis.' The author feels that Frankel's paper anticipates ideas in use in the modern literature and deserves wider recognition. However, it has lain unnoticed for the last 26 years, despite being published in this journal. Subsequently, the author asks why Frankel's paper attracted so little attention at the time and why it has remained in obscurity for so long.

The article discusses researches conducted by economists Paul A. David, Warren J. Scoville and Earl J. Hamilton. Researcher Stanley Engerman in his discussion on David's article suggests that his article represents the most thorough study in the debate concerning American economic growth between 1800 and 1840. It is based both on new time series not previously utilized and upon the resourceful application of available data to clarify certain key points. Another researcher Ross M. Robertson while discussing Scoville's article finds his article on the whole persuasive. Robertson certainly has no quarrel with his quantitative inferences, nor for that matter with his description of French governmental regulation in the eighteenth century. He was not altogether convinced of the direct correlation between the paper industry's expansion and the relaxation of direct governmental controls that Scoville alleges. Perhaps Scoville's more extended publications on this subject will elucidate this relationship.

This article reassesses the links between aid, policy, and growth. In an influential paper, Craig Burnside and David Collar find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal, monetary, and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor policies. This finding has enormous policy implications. The Burnside and Dollar (BD) result provides a role and strategy for foreign aid. If aid stimulates growth only in countries with good policies, this suggests that aid can promote economic growth, and it is crucial that foreign aid be distributed selectively to countries that have adopted sound policies. International aid agencies, public policy makers, and the press quickly recognized the importance of the BD findings. The BD data end in 1993. This article reconstructs the BD database from original sources and adds additional countries and observations to the BD data set because new information has become available since they conducted their analyses, and extends the data through 1997. Thus, using the BD methodology, it is reexamined whether aid influences growth in the presence of good policies. This paper conducts a simple robustness check by adding new data that were unavailable to BD.

The article discusses various reports published within the article, including several papers discussing fluctuations caused by the economic crisis of 2008-2009, several papers concerning convergence in macroeconomics, and several papers focusing on trade and growth.

The article presents discussions by economists on papers by economists James N. Morgan and James D. Smith that was published in the May 1, 1970 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that the two papers presented by Morgan and Smith reflect changing times. According to the author, income distribution and especially the distribution at the low end are back in the spotlight as an issue of social policy and appropriately it is eliciting scientific attention. Early in the 1960's, concern with sharing the national economic pie was eclipsed by the urgent concern about the lagging growth of the pie. Economists were wise to focus on the aggregative issues in the early 1960's and it is wise to shift focus onto distributive issues as one enters the 1970's. Now that the U.S. has reaped important benefits of economic growth and high employment, other problems deserve emphasis. Both of the present papers make a contribution to that knowledge. They reflect different methodological approaches and stress different issues. They do share one substantive characteristic, pointing to the importance of labor force participation by the wife as a key determinant of family income and income changes.

The article presents discussions by economists on some papers that are published in the May 1, 1953 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that all papers in their concluding analysis focus upon long-term changes in economic life. This is reflected in their growing preoccupation with economic development. But beyond this new interest is the recent impact of sociology upon economics. Sociological theory, whether that stated in terms of values or the less subjectively oriented concepts of social organization and process, derives from broader cross-cultural comparisons. Economists have been forced to acknowledge that much of their analytical framework is of specific rather than generalized applicability and as a result they are virtually compelled to view problems of economic development and change as intertwined with other aspects of a social system. Economist Joseph J. Spengler relates sociological value theory to economics with his usual sound and broad perspective. The author disagrees with Spengler's main conclusions.

After World War II, international capital flowed into slow-growing Latin America rather than fast-growing Asia. This is surprising as, everything else equal, fast growth should imply high capital returns. This paper develops a capital flow accounting framework to quantify the role of different factor market distortions in producing these patterns. Surprisingly, we find that distortions in labor markets, rather than domestic or international capital markets, account for the bulk of these flows. Labor market distortions that indirectly depress investment incentives by lowering equilibrium labor supply explain two-thirds of observed flows, while improvement in these distortions over time accounts for much of Asia's rapid growth. (JEL E22, E24, E32, F21, F32, O16, O47) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of temporary trade protection on long-term economic development. I find that regions in the French Empire which became better protected from trade with the British for exogenous reasons during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) increased capacity in mechanized cotton spinning to a larger extent than regions which remained more exposed to trade. In the long run, regions with exogenously higher spinning capacity had higher activity in mechanized cotton spinning. They also had higher value added per capita in industry up to the second half of the nineteenth century, but not later. (JEL F13, L67, N43, N63, N73) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the book and assesses the reviews contained in the four contributed papers. Gregory Clark provides convincing arguments that extend the book's forecast that future technological change will be slower. Nicholas Crafts shows declining mortality and shorter work hours greatly increase welfare-augmented TFP growth during 1929-50. Benjamin Friedman points out that optimism about future technological change casts doubt on future employment growth, while technological pessimism implies employment optimism. Daron Acemoglu and co-authors emphasize the institutional environment that influences the timing and magnitude of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents some titles of new books on economics. Some books are: The Angel and the Wheat--Communication Theory and Economics," by S. Bagno, A Strategy of Decision--Policy Evaluation As a Social Process," by D. Braybrooke and C.E. Lindhlom; "Are We Slaves of Some Defunct Economist?" by D.M. Keezer; Insuring Full Employment--A United States Policy for Domestic Prosperity and World Development," by J.H.G. Pierson; The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays," by G.J. Stigler; "Prices for Primary Producers," by S. Caine; "Capital Stock Growth: A Micro-Econometric Approach," by S. Kuh; "A Study of Cost and Demand Inflation," by J.D. Pitchford; "Profitability and Size of Firm," by H.O. Stekler; "Land Reforms in West Bengal--A Study on Implementation," by S.K. Basu and S.K. Bhattacharyya; "Output Employment and Productivity Growth in New Zealand Manufacturing Industries," by C.A. Blyth and P. Hamer; "Economic Development: Past and Present," by R.T. Gill; "Planning Economic Development," edited by E.E. Hagen.

The extent of demographic changes in Europe is much more drastic than in the United States. This paper studies the effects of population aging on the interactions between economic growth and living standards in Europe with labor market and pension reform, behavioral adaptations, and international capital flows. Our analysis is based on an overlapping generations model with behavioral reactions to reform which is extended to the multi-country situation typical for Europe. While the negative effects of population aging on growth in Europe can in principle be compensated by reforms and economic adaptation mechanisms, they may be partially offset by behavioral reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hybrid. Defining poverty based on PPP$2 per capita consumption, community targeting and the hybrid perform somewhat worse in identifying the poor than PMT, though not by enough to significantly affect poverty outcomes for a typical program. Elite capture does not explain these results. Instead, communities appear to apply a different concept of poverty. Consistent with this finding, community targeting results in higher satisfaction. (JEL C93, I32, I38, O12, O15, O18, R23) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro-level data have had a profound influence on research in international trade over the last ten years. In many regards, this research agenda has been very successful. New stylized facts have been uncovered and new trade models have been developed to explain these facts. In this paper we investigate to what extent answers to new micro-level questions have affected answers to an old and central question in the field: how large are the welfare gains from trade?? A crude summary of our results is: 'So far, not much.' (JEL F11, F12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how foreign aid is detrimental to the recipient country's economic growth. It states that aid may be associated with weak governance, perhaps because the inflow of aid reduces governmental need to tax the governed or enlist their cooperation. It offers a methodological approach to check if governance matters or not, based on the growth of industries dependent on the government. The article also states that the form in which aid is received can have an adverse effect that limits its value and lowers investment profits and growth. The article stats that while humanitarian need is essential, economic aid will likely play a much smaller part in the process of economic growth, and that aid is not a panacea.

This article discusses a study which focused on the measurement of product variety in trade, using a broad cross section of advanced and developing countries and disaggregating across sectors. In a companion paper, the researchers also computed the total factor productivity across countries, using a translog gross domestic product. One figure in the study showed a scatter plot of the export variety in 1991 for the sales of 34 countries to the U.S., against their country productivity. There is a positive relationship between the product variety of a country and its productivity, which is highlighted by the positive sloping regression line. Canada has the most product variety, and this country produces nearly twice as much variety as the sample mean. In terms of export variety, Japan produces 80 percent more export products than the sample mean. Other countries that have higher than sample productivity and export variety include South Korea, Singapore, and other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries such as France and Australia. Countries that perform poorly in terms of the country productivity and export variety include Kenya, Greece, Philippines, Turkey and Uruguay.

In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits, because political boundaries determine the size of the market. Under free trade and global markets even relatively small cultural, linguistic or ethnic groups can benefit from forming small, homogeneous political jurisdictions. This paper provides a formal model of the relationship between openness and the equilibrium number and size of countries, and successfully tests two implications of the model. Firstly, the economic benefits of country size are mediated by the degree of openness to trade. Secondly, the history of nation-state creations and secessions is influenced by the trade regime. (JEL F02, O57) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the current belief that income inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth. It uses an improved data set on income inequality which not only reduces measurement error, but also allows estimation via a panel technique. Panel estimation makes it possible to control for time-invariant country-specific effects, therefore eliminating a potential source of omitted-variable bias. Results suggest that in the short and medium term, an increase in a country's level of income inequality has a significant positive relationship with subsequent economic growth. This relationship is highly robust across samples, variable definitions, and model specifications. (JEL O40, O15, E25) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-run growth in many models is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore's Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling of computer chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. More generally, everywhere we look we find that ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find. (JEL D24, E23, O31, O47) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism is a fast-growing services sector in developing countries. This paper combines a rich collection of Mexican microdata with a quantitative spatial equilibrium model and a new empirical strategy to study the long-term economic consequences of tourism both locally and in the aggregate. We find that tourism causes large and significant local economic gains relative to less touristic regions that are in part driven by significant positive spillovers on manufacturing. In the aggregate, however, these local spillovers are largely offset by reductions in agglomeration economies among less touristic regions, so that the national gains from trade in tourism are mainly driven by a classical market integration effect. (JEL L60, L83, O14, O18, R11, Z31, Z32) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews some of the major claims in Robert Gordon's Rise and Fall of American Growth. His argument that growth of conventional real GDP per person is well below that of real living standards is accepted. It is shown that adding an imputation to GDP for reductions in mortality raises growth substantially, especially between 1929 and 1950. Gordon is also right that total factor productivity growth peaked in the second and third quarters of the twentieth century but his claim that there was a 'great leap forward' in the 1940s, stimulated by World War 2, is not persuasive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo-links across generations. We find that both father-son and father-daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century, increased sharply between 1900 and 1920, and declined slightly thereafter. We discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development, trends in inequality and returns to human capital, and the marriage market in explaining these patterns. (JEL D63, J12, J16, J24, J62, N31, N32) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is inequality harmful for growth? We suggest that it is. In a society where distributional conflict is important, political decisions produce economic policies that tax investment and growth-promoting activities in order to redistribute income. The paper formulates a theoretical model that captures this idea. The model's implications are supported by the evidence. Both historical panel data and postwar cross sections indicate a significant and large negative relation between inequality and growth. This relation is only present in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's opinion with regard to George Stigler's views on the practice of political economy in the United States. The evidence presented in the paper of Stigler seems persuasive to me. It is difficult to look at this analysis and still subscribe to the widely held view that election results are highly sensitive to swings in business conditions. Once again we seem to have found that what everybody knows to be true is not necessarily true. Since Stigler's analysis on macro evidence is exhaustive and impressive, suppose we turn to micro evidence to see if it provides any clues to an understanding of why the macro results turn out the way that they do. Here we do gain some insight into attitudes pertinent to Stigler's analysis. What the views of Stigler suggest is that within reasonable tolerances, changes in political sentiment are more apt to reflect the myriad of other factors that bear on voter sentiment. If the swing is outside these tolerances, or if the event is sufficiently visible or discrete, economic developments can exert a substantial effect on citizen support or the incumbent. If therefore, the economic indicators start to waver, the economist may sleep well at night, knowing that in all probability it means little, but the politician may for very good reasons remains awake, wondering if this will be one of those cases that transforms him into a statesman.

The article presents a list of conferences to be held on various topics, from December 27-29, 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts as part of the 76th Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association. A meeting on the theme Principles of Efficiency to be presided over by Paul A. Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The papers to be discussed are The Measurement of Waste by Arnold Harberger and The Efficient Allocation of Capital by Jack Hershleifer. A meeting on the theme Re-Appraisals in American Economic History to be presided over by Douglass North of the University of Washington. The papers to be discussed are A New Look at Hunter's Hypothesis about the Ante-Bellum Iron Industry by Peter Temin, Ante-Bellum Interregional Trade Reconsidered by Albert Fishlow and Canals and Development -- A Discussion of the Issue by Roger Ransom. A meeting on Comparative Costs and Economic Development to be presided over by C. P.Kindleberger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The papers to be discussed are The Experience of India by Wilfred Malenbaum, The African Situation by Walter A. Chudson and The Case of Brazil by Werner Baer.

The article presents authors' comments on two research papers on economic development of China by economists Ta-Chung Liu, Kung-Chia Yeh and Alexander Eckstein. In his paper Eckstein has argued that the Chinese followed in Soviet footsteps of concentrating on capital-intensive industrial projects during their First Five Year Plan. During the Second Five Year Plan, however, they opened up a second front of labor-intensive investments in both industry and agriculture, thereby embracing technological dualism. The article discusses in brief Eckstein's underestimation of the Soviet rate of investment, the extent of "technological dualism" in underdeveloped areas and the reason for disparities between China and the Soviet Union in labor productivity growth rates. Moreover, the article asserts that paper of professors Liu and Yeh is a major contribution to the literature on Communist China. It is a study, which is a short-run contribution sheds light on specific economic developments in China from 1949 to present, and in a long-run contribution pointedly reminds that there is nothing so basic or central to economics as its' principles.

The article presents authors' comments on three research papers on economic development after Second World War by economists Erik Lundberg, George H. Hildebrand and Shigeto Tsuru. These papers point out some striking contrasts among the experiences of countries including Scandinavia, Japan and Italy and the postwar experience of the U.S. For example, these papers insistently raise the question why the U.S. has done so poorly in achieving stable and rapid growth. They discuss whether it is a matter of economic structure, or partly a fault of economic policy. Research paper by Hildebrand provides a summary both of the Italian postwar economic achievement and of Italy's still pressing problems of unemployment and incomplete development. But there are aspects of his analysis that needs to be questioned. Moreover, papers of Hildebrand and Tsuru gave the impression that something of a catching-up process has been important in the Italian and Japanese economies. In his paper Lundberg drew attention to some destabilizing effects of governmental action in Sweden. They refer to public investments or publicly controlled investments as an instrument of anti cyclical policy.

On March 24, 1959, the U.S., Senate and House directed the Joint Economic Committee to conduct a large-scale investigation into the problems of maximum employment, an adequate rate of economic growth and the maintenance of price stability. On January 10, 1960, less than a year later, the Committee and the staff assembled for the purpose concluded its task, having published a Committee Report. It will be some time before the profession has managed to digest the enormous volume of material. This article is particularly concerned with the two central documents, the Committee and Staff Reports. There is a vast amount of useful analysis in the Staff Report and , the hearings and the study papers. The center topics are difficult and complicated in the extreme. There are marks of haste and insufficient integration throughout the Staff Report, insufficient time is the obvious source of many of its shortcomings. Bluntly put, it was ridiculous to expect that a staff could be assembled, hearings held, study projects assigned, and the whole enormous resultant mass digested, in less than a year. Viewed against the background of this limiting factor, the Staff Report emerges as a remarkably good performance.

The article presents a critical discussion of the two papers by Edgar M. Hoover and Joseph Shister on the factors related to investment for the individual firms. According to the author Hoover has demonstrated considerable dexterity in weaving into his model several of the more important institutional characteristics. But Hoover seems to stop short of asking the significant questions relevant to economic growth. The really important one would seem to be, do the institutional changes outlined make for more or less capital accumulation? The author remarks that if one fully accept the analysis as realistic of firm behavior, what changes are portended in the rate of economic growth? Turning now to Professor Shister, the impression which is immediately gained from his paper is the breadth of its scope and the transparency of its composition. Shister chose to deal with his subject on an over-all level, relating union practices and policies to the growth pattern of the American economy as a whole. This approach has both its merits and its shortcomings.

The article presents discussion by various economists, on the two papers by Arthur H. Cole and Ross M. Robertson about the changing role of competition and economic growth in the U.S. economy. According to Frank H. Knight, the paper on the role of entrepreneurship in economic growth does not deals with concepts and principles in a way to throw down a direct challenge to a theorist. One thing he misses in this article is any use of words recognizing that profit means profit or loss and is in fact as likely to be a loss as a gain. It is surely a significant fact that although the entrepreneur is dynamically the central figure in our free enterprise economy, his function in its purity and on the whole does not seem to share in the fruits of production, or even shares negatively. Commenting on the two papers the author that the common theme of the two papers probably lies in the view that theorists have failed to develop the analytical apparatus which is best suited for prediction and policy making in the mid-century U.S.

This article discusses various papers on economic developments, which were published in the May 1, 1953 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The basic difficulty in the theory of economic development is the necessity of dealing with behavioral relations and not merely logical deductions from simple assumptions. There is widespread agreement on a minimal definition of economic growth as an increase in national product per capita. Another vital conceptual element in a theory of economic development would be an emphasis on the scarcity of resources. Since it is not possible to pursue all lines, allocating enough resources to all four categories to ensure adequate change, the problem is to make sure that a given resource allocation to any one of the four variables also provides enough support to the other three to ensure sustained and cumulative progress. In this shrinking world it is equally important to lay stress upon the values of international co-operation and interdependence. Such a viewpoint may run counter to prevalent currents of nationalism and national economic planning.

The article presents the report of the American Economic Association's representative to the International Economic Association for 1974. During the calendar year, the International Economic Association held a conference in Italy, a world congress in Hungary, a workshop in Turkey, and an East-West meeting in Switzerland. The conference in Turin, Italy, April 1 to 6, was on The Economics of Public Services. The World Congress in Budapest, Hungary, was held from August 19 to 24 on Economic Integration: Worldwide, Regional, Sectoral. The program provided for papers and reports in plenary sessions and for papers and general discussion in ten separate working groups. The largest delegation came from the USSR with 280 members. The U.S. was represented by 78 participants. The workshop at the Bosphorus University in Istanbul, Turkey, was held September 2 to 6 on Population and Development. The East-West Conference was held from August 29 to September 3 in Montreaux, Switzerland, on Recent Economic Developments in Socialist and Non-Socialist Countries.

This paper examines the relationship between income, pollution, and mortality in China from 1991-2012. Using first-difference models, we document a robust positive association between city-level GDP and life expectancy. We also find a negative association between city-level particulate air pollution exposure and life expectancy that is driven by elevated cardiorespiratory mortality rates. The results suggest that while China's unprecedented economic growth over the last two decades is associated with health improvements, pollution has served as a countervailing force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TseTse fly is unique to Africa and transmits a parasite harmful to humans and lethal to livestock. This paper tests the hypothesis that the TseTse reduced the ability of Africans to generate an agricultural surplus historically. Ethnic groups inhabiting TseTse-suitable areas were less likely to use domesticated animals and the plow, less likely to be politically centralized, and had a lower population density. These correlations are not found in the tropics outside of Africa, where the fly does not exist. The evidence suggests current economic performance is affected by the TseTse through the channel of pre colonial political centralization. (JEL I12, N57, O13, O17, Q12, Q16, Q18) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quantity of human-generated light visible from outer space reflects variation in both population density and income per capita. In this paper we explore the usefulness of the change in visible light as a measure of GDP growth. We discuss the data, and then present a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, assuming that measurement errors in the two series are uncorrelated. For some countries with very poor income measurement, we significantly revise estimates of growth. Our technique also produces growth estimates for cities or regions where no other data are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research which was conducted to investigate the impact that climate shocks such as global warming had on economic activity, including the gross domestic product and the export trade, of poor and rich countries. Researchers evaluated data sets on national climate, exports to the United States and exports to the broader world for several countries. They found that higher temperatures in poor countries led to large negative impacts on the growth of their exports and gross domestic product, with the largest impacts being seen in agricultural exports and light manufacturing exports. They found that higher temperatures seemed to have no effect on rich countries.

The article presents an examination into the presence, or absence, of "managerial capital," within the economic systems of developing nations. Introductory comments are given noting institutional challenges facing the economic growth of developing countries and the missing component is identified by the authors as a specific form of human capital. A review of empirical research concerning managerial workers and their importance to the effective growth of their sectors is given. Conclusions are offered asserting that managerial capital is a limiting factor in firm growth and that a lack of ability to teach managerial skill also inhibits progress.

The author responds to criticism by Michael Tomz, Judith L. Goldstein, and Douglas Rivers of his previously published article "Do We Really Know That the WTO Increases Trade?," which appeared in the "American Economic Review." They assert that when he studied countries belonging to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, commonly referred to as GATT, and its replacement organization, the World Trade Organization (WTO), he did not properly grasp the classifications of membership within the organizations. He freely agrees with their assertions. However, he feels that preferential trade agreements and protectionist tariffs still hamper any real progress by the WTO to foster free trade.

Why did Western Europe industrialize first? An influential view holds that its exceptionally well-functioning markets supported with a certain set of institutions provided the incentives to make investments needed to industrialize. This paper examines this hypothesis by comparing the actual performance of markets in terms of market integration in Western Europe and China, two regions that were relatively advanced in the preindustrial period, but would start to industrialize about 150 years apart. We find that the performance of markets in China and Western Europe overall was comparable in the late eighteenth century. Market performance in England was higher than in the Yangzi Delta, and markets in England also performed better than those in continental Western Europe. This suggests strong market performance may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for industrialization. Rather than being a key condition for subsequent growth, improvements in market performance and growth occurred simultaneously. (JEL N13, N15, O47) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a model where reductions in mortality are the main force behind economic development. The model generates a pattern of changes similar to the demographic transition, where gains in life expectancy at birth are followed by reductions in fertility and increases in the rate of human capital accumulation. The onset of the transition is characterized by a critical level of life expectancy at birth, which marks the movement of the economy from a Malthusian equilibrium to an equilibrium with investments in human capital and the possibility of long-run growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of education in the promotion of democracy. Education is argued to promote democracy both because it enables a "culture of democracy" to develop and because it leads to greater prosperity, which is also thought to cause political development. The most celebrated version of this argument is the modernization theory, popularized by public policy professor Seymour Martin Lipset, which emphasizes the role of education as well as economic growth in promoting political development in general and democracy in particular.

The article discusses the work of Hans Heymann, John H. Kaufmann and Wilfred Owen on transportation and economic development in the U.S. Heymann's paper is concerned with the necessity of air transport, and therefore refers only to the prestige allure of an international service. This is political economy through the looking glass. Instead of the classical end of greatest wealth and the classical means of, this is what one does, it should start with, this is what one does and end with greatest wealth subject to this constraint. The most obvious is a tendency to reduce the importance of international specialization. This may be wise, in the sense that the area previously specialized in some product which is due to become a drug on the international market. It may be unwise, in the sense that the country has overwhelming comparative advantages and disadvantages. The tendency to reduce international specialization may be the occasion for a growth, or an accelerated growth, in real income-due to the application of a dynamic policy in an area which is customarily viewed by economists as a problem in comparative statics, or it may impede or even reverse economic growth.

This article presents the authors' comments on different essays on the developmental problems faced by most underdeveloped countries. According to Simon Kuznet, the pre-industrial per capita income level of developed countries was several times that of most underdeveloped countries today. It is generally concluded that today's less-developed countries face a much more difficult development problem than faced nineteenth-century industrializers. The main problem is their poverty which is measured by per capita income. Some recent essays have directly challenged this view. Alan Heston and Robert Summers also point in a similar direction. One important conclusion in their paper is that a development plan in South Asia will require many fewer resources than calculations on official exchange rate suggest. According to them, per capita income is not the way to a satisfactory understanding of the development process. The economic historians are now recognizing the widely diverse patterns of development through which even the already developed countries have moved. In another paper, Albert Fishlow presents a discussion on the extent to which the links between Brazil and the international economy generated or held back new development.

The article presents information on two models of economic development and the theory of international trade. The first consists of a simple diagrammatic exposition of an interesting but heavily mathematical paper by Murray Kemp and M. Ohyama and the second outlines the essential features of an approach to the analysis of North-South economic relations. The structure of the world economy assumed by Kemp-Ohyama is one in which the North and South each have a fixed endowment of labor and capital. Labor is tied to each region but capital is internationally mobile in response to any differences in return. In the other model to be discussed, there is an asymmetry in the labor market between the two regions, the North having full employment with a flexible real wage and the South a fixed real wage and variable employment. The North is completely specialized in a single composite manufactured good, which can be used for either consumption or investment as in a neoclassical growth model. The output of both manufactures and the primary commodity are subject to neoclassical production functions with constant returns to scale and labor and capital as inputs denoting the capital-labor ratios. Capital consists of a stock of manufactures in each case, which can be augmented by investment. Depreciation is ignored for simplicity. Saving in the South is a constant fraction of profits, all wages being consumed. The South also consumes both products with demand depending on relative prices. Income elasticities of demand are assumed to be unity in both regions.

This article re-examines the growth of Soviet industry in terms of the production function and rate of technical change. In a pioneering article, Martin Weitzman rigorously analyzed the phenomenon of post-war economic growth in Soviet industry. His paper represents the first systematic attempt at identifying the production function for Soviet industry without making the competitive relations assumption. Weitzman's main conclusions are the following: (1) the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function with constant returns to scale adequately represents postwar growth in Soviet industry; (2) the estimated elasticity of substitution of .403 is significantly less than 1; and (3) the estimated technical change parameter of .0205 is not different from the parameter value of .023 for U.S. manufacturing in the recent period. The specification of the production function and the underlying assumptions in the following analysis are essentially similar to those of Weitzman. The difference is that the dependent variable is defined alternately in terms of gross output and gross value-added, and raw materials are explicitly considered. The CES and Cobb-Douglas forms with variable and constant returns to scale were fitted to the time-series data. Two gross output series, Soviet and Desai, and Weitzman's hybrid series, were used for esti-mating production functions defined on capital, labor, and raw materials.

The article compares the economic development achievements of China and India. This paper is based on my own firsthand research in the People's Republic of China and India during the second half of the 196O's, as well as information derived from numerous other sources. Economic development performance is reflected in such conventional indicators as gross national product and per capita income growth rates, industrial and agricultural output, etc. China has done considerably better than India in the last twenty-five years or so with regard to most indicators of economic development. The central thesis of this paper is that the willingness and ability of people to work relatively hard and effectively on a national scale for goals that inspire them are perhaps the most important factors in explaining a country's economic development, and that such willingness and ability stem chiefly from a country's social development, as defined above. The paper will focus on a number of aspects and indicators of social development which clearly seem to be associated with and highly relevant to explaining differences in the economic performance of these two countries. In fact, it appears that a good case can be made that there is a causative as well as a correlative relationship between various key aspects of social development and economic development performance.

The article assesses the goals of economic development in the U.S. The theme of this paper is the need to be more specific on the goals of economic development and the interdependence between values and goals. The paper shall first review some recent work which bears on these relationships. Then proposed minimum humanistic goal for development will be discussed and, finally, the article shall suggest development strategies that may permit achievement of that goal. The currently accepted definition of development focuses upon the creation of conditions for self-sustained growth in per capita gross national product and the requisite modernization of economic, social, and political structures implicit in the achievement of this goal. Most of the discussion concerning development strategies has been in terms of contemporary tradeoffs among major policy packages, rather than in terms of sequences of more or less pure strategies. A cursory survey of the dynamic processes that have led to the development of the currently industrialized nations suggests, however, that the development process has in fact proceeded as a sequence of pure strategies, rather than in a progression of mutually balanced strategy mixes.

This paper deals with the adequacy of natural resource supplies to support an indefinite continuation of high rates of economic growth in advanced industrial economies. This paper is inspired by a recent spate of apocalyptic literature purporting to show that natural resource constraints impose an insuperable obstacle to such growth. The author suggests that this extreme pessimism is unwarranted because it attaches insufficient weight to an impressive array of adaptive mechanisms through which a market economy responds to shifting patterns of resource scarcity. Most important, he argues that technological change is, in the long run, the most powerful mechanism of response. The purpose of the author's recourse to history is to provide some insight into the manner in which economies possessed of a high degree of technological versatility have adapted to changing patterns of resource scarcities. The author notes that arguments drawn from the past history of countries which have demonstrated a high degree of technological innovativeness are not likely to be directly applicable to countries where such skills and talents have been notably lacking. The author believes that history can an insuperable obstacle to such growth.

This article presents views on the study about the trade policies in developing countries. According to the author the nontariff barrier makes it difficult for the developing country exporter to cope than the exporter in a rich country who has resources, marketing apparatus and quality control. The author also presented that in evaluating alternative growth strategies in developing nations the cost of implementing social and economic objectives relating to income distribution, employment, land reform, spreading of technological and market knowledge and political modernization must always be accounted.

The article presents a list that specifies doctoral degrees conferred during the academic year terminating June 1964, and theses undertaken in the same period. For General Economics; Methodology, degrees conferred to James F. Hofheinz for his paper on The evolution of economic philosophy. For Price and Allocation Theory; Income and Employment Theory; History of Economic Thought, degrees was conferred to Cleverland W. Bateman for his paper on Investment behavior and the acceleration principle. For Economic History; Economic Development; National Economies, degrees was conferred to researcher Ralph Anspach on his paper The problem of a plural economy and its effects on Indonesia's economic structure: a study in economic policy. For Statistical Methods; Econometrics; Social Accounting, the degree was conferred to researcher Takeshi Amemiya on his paper Specification analysis in econometrics. For Economic System; Planning and Reform: Cooperation, the degree was con fared to Michael Boreteky for his paper on The Soviet challenge to U. S. machine building: a study in production and technological policy.