Search

This paper explores the origins of German banks' risk‐taking in the years preceding the 1931 crisis. The 1920s were marked by a large and prolonged increase in capital flows into Germany, chiefly from the United States and the United Kingdom. This coincided, at the individual bank level, with a rise in leverage and a fall in liquidity. We examine possible connections between the two phenomena. Our analysis is based on a combination of historiographical work and statistical modelling based on a newly hand‐collected bimonthly dataset on German reporting banks from 1925 to 1935. Bank by bank we examine the effects of foreign inflows on decisions related to leverage, lending, and liquidity. The Dawes Plan of 1924 and the relative absence of a too‐big‐to‐fail (TBTF) environment allow us to mitigate endogeneity concerns. We suggest that while capital inflows did not seem to impact banks' liquidity decisions, their impact on leverage was non‐negligeable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clean water provision is considered crucial for eradicating waterborne diseases. However, the benefits of piped water can be limited in environments characterized by the inadequate storage and disposal of waste. This article studies the impact of waterworks and sewerage on mortality in German cities during the period 1877–1913. The results show that the supply of safe drinking water reduced the number of deaths, although to a lower extent than suggested previously. In the absence of efficient systems of sewage removal, contact with faeces and water contamination created a favourable environment for the spread of enteric ailments, offsetting some of the positive effects of waterworks. Moreover, the study shows that sanitary investments had important heterogeneous effects. First, their impact was markedly lower in municipalities with high levels of economic inequality and employment in the textile sector. Second, cities located in non‐Prussian territories experienced lower declines in mortality following the construction of sanitary infrastructures. The results in this article highlight the importance of analysing public health measures jointly as well as their interaction with local socioeconomic and institutional factors to understand historical progress against ill health and premature death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using social tables, this article provides new data on inequality in Germany and Britain on an annual basis for the first half of the twentieth century. Inequality trends in these two countries tended to follow opposite patterns. The decline in inequality in Germany was interrupted during the First World War and the Nazi period, while in Britain the reversal took place between the end of the First World War and the Great Depression. Results show that the drop in inequality during the twentieth century in Europe did not follow secular trends, thus supporting the notion of inequality cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the spread of innovation in mid‐nineteenth‐century Germany using foreign patents as an indicator for technology transfer. It introduces a new dataset of over 1,400 patents granted in the Grand Duchy of Baden between 1843 and 1877. The data show that Baden's technology import via foreign patents from German and non‐German inventors was important. This technology transfer was broadly based, although technologies related to the textile and machine‐building industries are prominent in the data. The decision to file a patent in Baden was driven by competition and the risk of imitation. Using a gravity model with city‐level data, we find evidence that technology transfer through patents reflected existing trade links. The strong correlation between technologies filed by foreigners and domestic inventors provides further evidence that the risk of imitation fostered patent‐based technology transfer during the mid‐nineteenth century. Furthermore, we show that foreigners filed patents predominantly in industries that accounted for a high share of the workforce in Baden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses price information relating to 12 towns and wage information from 18 towns to develop a real wage index for unskilled urban labourers in Germany during the three-and-a-half centuries preceding the onset of rapid industrialization. Combining the new series with information from other parts of Europe establishes two stages of real wage divergence during the seventeenth to nineteenth century. The first occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century when real wages in centres of trade and finance located on the rim of the North Sea rose far above the level prevailing in their hinterland. The second stage unfolded from the second quarter of the eighteenth century when the real wage in south England, northern and central Italy, and Germany began to diverge; Germany followed a middle path between the other two countries. The second commercial revolution, which improved business techniques and promoted Smithian growth, goes a long way towards accounting for this development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the late 1920s, German coal mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity, led by the performance of the Ruhr coal mines. It is commonly accepted in the relevant literature that the economy-wide 'rationalization boom' explains that pattern. This study tests the related hypothesis that 'negative rationalization', in the form of a massive wave of mine closures over the period 1924-9, played a significant role in stimulating aggregate labour productivity in the Ruhr coal district. Using an original dataset for the totality of Ruhr coal mines, the causes of productivity change over the broader period 1913-38 are identified, using the decomposition method of Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan. Results suggest that labour productivity was driven largely by improvements at individual mines, attributable to the intensified mechanization of underground operations. In sharp contrast, turnover effects were marginal, overall, compared to the effects stemming from the producer dynamics among surviving mines. Thus, the practical productivity implications of mine closures during the rationalization boom are negligible and overrated in the literature. These findings indicate the necessity of testing the relative importance of 'negative rationalization' in the form of plant closures in other branches of the Weimar economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to conventional wisdom, the fall of the Swedish currency in September 1931 was caused by the sterling crisis. This article shows that the road towards devaluation began earlier and that financial linkages with Germany proved to be more important than Sweden's economic and monetary relations with Great Britain. It all started in late 1929 when the Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger gave a loan to the German government in exchange for the match monopoly, thus tying his business ventures to Germany's solvency. In addition, a part of this loan was financed by large US dollar credits from the two largest Swedish banks that, in turn, accumulated a sizeable foreign short-term deficit. When in June 1931 the German fiscal crisis began to escalate, international investors ceased to consider Sweden a safe haven because they knew about the linkages between the German government, Kreuger, and the Swedish banking system. This downgrading, in combination with the foreign short-term deficit of the banking sector, proved lethal for the reserve position of the Swedish central bank, once the international liquidity crisis in mid-July 1931 erupted. The sterling crisis only put the final nail in the coffin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many public pension insurance schemes today use the pay-as-you-go financing mechanism. This mechanism is vulnerable to an ageing population, which puts pressure on the intergenerational contract implicit in these schemes and raises the question as to how they might be eroded. This is not a new problem, and to put it into historical perspective, this article studies the intergenerational contract that formed the core of the Prussian miners' invalidity insurance in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century (1861-1920). With the so-called Knappschaften, miners relied on what was probably the most comprehensive and advanced occupational pension system existing in Germany around the time when Bismarckian social insurance was established. Financed via the pay-as-you-go mechanism, the miners' pension funds faced stress from their ageing memberships early on, and this potentially undermined their ability to maintain intergenerationally fair pensions. In order to examine whether or not the intergenerational contract among German miners showed signs of erosion, we look at the Knappschaftens' profitability, as measured by actual and promised internal rates of return. This article shows that the intergenerational contract indeed weakened over time unless miners' funds were large and continued to grow, and that a pension reform in 1906 served to stabilize generosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do new school types focusing on practical and business-related knowledge lead to increased economic performance? To analyse this question, this article examines the introduction of two types of modern secondary education, the Gewerbeschule and its successor, the Realschule, in nineteenth-century Bavaria. Since the opening of these schools is arguably endogenous-as it was mainly the large, prosperous cities that opened one-the estimated treatment effect capturing the economic influence of the Gewerbeschule/ Realschule will lead to biased results. To alleviate this bias, propensity score matching is adopted to compare relatively similar counties with and without these schools. Using historical county-level data on tax revenues, business formations, employment structure, and patent holdings, ordinary least squares regression analysis shows that the opening of a modern secondary school is in general positively associated with economic performance several years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the onset of the First World War, Germany was subject to a shipping embargo by the Allied forces. Ostensibly military in nature, the blockade prevented not only armaments but also food and fertilizers from entering Germany. The impact of that blockade on civilian populations has been debated ever since. Germans protested that the Allies had wielded hunger as a weapon against women and children with devastating results, a claim that was hotly denied by the Allies. The impact of what the Germans termed the Hungerblockade on childhood nutrition can now be assessed using a newly discovered dataset based on heights and weights of nearly 600,000 German schoolchildren measured between 1914 and 1924. Statistical analysis reveals a grim truth: German children suffered severe malnutrition due to the blockade. Social class impacted risk of deprivation, with working-class children suffering the most. Surprisingly, they were the quickest to recover after the war. Their rescue was fuelled by massive food aid organized by the former enemies of Germany, and delivered cooperatively with both government and civil society. The ability of former belligerents to work together after an exceptionally bitter war to feed impoverished children may hold hope for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did imitations of Raiffeisen's rural cooperative savings and loans associations work well in some European countries, but fail in others? This article considers the example of Raiffeisenism in Ireland and in the Netherlands. Raiffeisen banks arrived in both places at the same time, but had drastically different fates. In Ireland they were almost wiped out by the early 1920s, while in the Netherlands they proved to be a long-lasting institutional transplant. Raiffeisen banks were successful in the Netherlands because they operated in niche markets with few competitors, while rural financial markets in Ireland were unsegmented and populated by long-established incumbents, leaving little room for new players, whatever their institutional advantages. Dutch Raiffeisen banks were largely self-financing, closely integrated into the wider rural economy, and able to take advantage of economic and religious divisions in rural society. Their Irish counterparts were not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of water, steam, and electric power transformed manufacturing in the nineteenth century. This article studies the relationship between this technological change and the spatial distribution of manufacturing industries in the German Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The adoption of steam powered machinery created incentives for manufacturers to form industry clusters near coal mining regions. Specifically, this article shows that a one standard deviation increase in the average size of steam power operations was associated with a rise in geographic concentration of one-quarter of a standard deviation. In contrast, a one standard deviation increase in the size of water power operations was associated with a drop in geographic concentration of one-sixth of a standard deviation. This is consistent with the constraint that water powered plants had to be located on a stream with a sufficient gradient and away from other water powered plants to avoid disruption from neighbouring gates and dams. Together the findings indicate that the transition from water to steam powered machinery contributed to the geographic concentration of manufacturing in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large universal banks played a major role in Germany's industrialization because they provided loans to industry and thereby helped firms to overcome liquidity constraints. Previous research has also argued that they were equally important for the German stock market. This article provides quantitative and qualitative evidence that although the market for underwriters was dominated by a small oligopoly of six large banks, there was still perceptible competition, which kept fees and short-run profits low. Another interesting finding presented here is the absence of a signalling effect to investors. Neither underpricing nor the one-year performance was different for the IPOs issued by one of the Big Six. Thus, although the German IPO business was in the hands of a small oligopoly, investors did not benefit from the lack of competition. One explanation is that the quality of IPOs on the German stock market of the time was very good in general as a result of the competition between underwriters, but also as a result of the tight regulation of underwriting, which ensured the quality of all firms on the German stock market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article anatomizes the 'productivity race' between Nazi Germany and the US over the period from the Great Depression to the Second World War in the metalworking industry. We present novel data that allow us to account for both the quantity of installed machine tools and their technological type. Hitherto, comparison of productive technologies has been limited to case studies and well-worn narratives about US mass production and European-style flexible specialization. Our data show that the two countries in fact employed similar types of machines combined in different ratios. Furthermore, neither country was locked in a rigid technological paradigm. By 1945 Germany had converged on the US both in terms of capital-intensity and the specific technologies employed. Capital investment made a greater contribution to output growth in Germany, whereas US growth was capital-saving. Total factor productivity growth made a substantial contribution to the armaments boom in both countries. But it was US industry, spared the war's most disruptive effects, that was in a position to take fullest advantage of the opportunities for wartime productivity growth. This adds a new element to familiar explanations for Germany's rapid catch-up after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the postwar period, the West German tobacco industry faced several challenges, not least competition from smuggled Virginia cigarettes. This reflected the Americanization of smoking tastes and threatened domestic tax revenue. The popular preference for 'American blend' cigarettes also hindered trade with Greece and Turkey, suppliers of Oriental tobacco to German manufacturers. The proposed solution was tax cuts to stimulate demand for domestically produced cigarettes. These proposals antagonized welfare groups, who saw tax cuts as a threat to the health of the population. The ensuing debates and settlement shed new light on the liberal smoking policies of postwar West Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Franco-German trade relationship is viewed from a long-term perspective, the conventional view that trade ties were rather good before 1914 becomes doubtful. In fact, trade statistics point to the absolute and relative decline in trade flows between the two countries after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. This postwar episode of Franco-German trade history is far from incidental. On the basis of a comprehensive study of Franco-German trade by product, this article reveals a complete restructuring of French trade with Germany after the conflict and invites a new analysis of its economic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalization was particularly important in the early 1930s in Germany. The state took over a large industrial concern, large commercial banks, and other minor firms. In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s. Privatization was used as a political tool to enhance support for the government and for the Nazi Party. In addition, growing financial restrictions because of the cost of the rearmament programme provided additional motivations for privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article it is claimed that, at least in the aircraft industry, the development of German armament production and productivity was much more continuous than Wagenführ's armament index and both the Blitzkrieg thesis and the inefficiency thesis suggest. In order to prove this new thesis of continuity, we show on the basis of firm-level data, firstly, that investment in production capacities had already started before the war and was especially high in the early phase of the war, and secondly, that the regulatory setting of aircraft production management was rather constant and was not dramatically changed after 1941. In addition, we demonstrate that the driving forces of productivity growth were primarily learning-by-doing and outsourcing, the latter being generally neglected by economic historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses club theory to explain why two major medieval commercial centres declined in the early modern period. Lübeck and Danzig illuminate the difficulties experienced by old-style European towns where early modern guilds (and other privileged ‘corporations’) had a lot of political influence in making the transition to the new style of north-west European cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg. The article refutes theories proposing that the special privileges awarded to a merchant elite enhanced economic growth; instead, it is argued that those privileges gave rise to ‘club goods’ that were beneficial only to a small number of merchants and were provided at the expense of society at large, resulting in economic decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1934, the Nazi regime decided to expand German staple fibre capacities significantly. The planned expansion expressed by the ‘National Pulp Programme’ was not only motivated by the balance of payments crisis at this time, but also by long-term autarky considerations. However, private companies and the Nazi regime disagreed on the size of the cellulose fibre markets and on how risks were to be shared. Therefore the Nazi regime considered the foundation of privately owned but actually state controlled new suppliers as a way of influencing the private companies to comply with its demands. However, as far as the established companies' willingness to invest was concerned, this strategy did not prove particularly successful. These companies were disposed to invest but only according to their long-term expectations regarding the potential staple fibre market given normal conditions; that is, with no import restrictions on natural fibres. Surprisingly, not only the big, established companies but also the private shareholders of the regional plants—often comparatively small textile companies—were not forced by the state to fulfil the requirements of the Nazi regime. Therefore these results suggest that the still-prevailing command economy thesis is not supported by the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a newly developed data set of 39,343 high-value patents granted between 1877 and 1918 to demonstrate that technological progress during German industrialization occurred in at least four different technological waves. We distinguish the railway wave (1877–86), the dye wave (1887–96), the chemical wave (1897–1902), and the wave of electrical engineering (1903–18). Evidence is presented that inter-industry knowledge spillovers between technologically, economically, and geographically related industries were a major source for innovative activities during German industrialization. We also show that technological change affected the geographical distribution of innovative regions. Using an index of technologically revealed comparative advantage we find that regions that increased their innovativeness during the waves of technological progress revealed special strength in technological clusters like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or chemicals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making profits in wartime: corporate profits, inequality, and GDP in Germany during the First World War. This article reconsiders, and rejects, Kocka's (1973) hypothesis that a strong income redistribution from workers to capital owners occurred in Germany during the First World War. A small number of firms profited from the war, but the majority experienced a decline in real income, similar to the decline in workers' real wages. This finding also has important implications for the political history of the Weimar Republic. The authors also use their figures to improve German GDP estimates for the war period, since their sample makes it possible to estimate private service sector development. Economic indicators were worse for the war year of 1917 than previously believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the unpublished payments of Germany from 1936 to 1941 and a set of bilateral foreign exchange accounts from 1938 to 1940. Discussion on the conflicting basic hypotheses and measurement concepts; Summary of data on foreign exchange balances; Calculation and analysis of the structural balance of payments deficits; Foreign trade between central European countries and Germany; Patterns of international trade.

This article examines the relationship between the government and economics in Weimar republic in Germany from 1925-1933. The sparse literature presents contradictory and unreconciled images of the relationship between economics and policy making in the Weimar republic and the Third Reich. Few would disagree that the intellectual unity of the historical school had collapsed by the outbreak of the First World War. The power of academics from the German establishment to shape public debate and to influence policy was on the wane from the turn of the century and declined dramatically during the war and its aftermath. This picture of doctrinal confusion is important because it underpins a particular interpretation of the making of economic policy in the Weimar republic. Despite their many differences, they all agree in attributing to economists and economic doctrine a role in the making of economic policy. In the inter war period the German nation-state attempted for the first time to govern the national economy in a managerial fashion and this experiment did not develop in a vacuum of theory but, rather, in continuous and intensive dialogue with contemporary economic research.

Examines the arms trade of Nazi Germany (Third Reich) during the 1930s, showing the relationship between the state and industry, through analysis of German arms producer Krupp. Involvement of the Krupp concern in the Third Reich; Outline of the organization of the country's arms exports during this period; Identification of the rivalry among German arms producers; Relationship between the Ausfuhrgemeinschaft fur Kriegsgerat (AGK), German arms producers and the Czech arms industry.

This article focuses on the inflation crisis in Germany during the early 1920s. The argument that inflation was inevitable owes much of its resilience to the idea that the balance of material gains and losses for the economy as a whole was on the side of gains. The point of considering economic policies, which would have been better, is not to condescend to the past, but to understand better what did happen. What is condescending to the past is to suggest that people at the time had no free will; that they were the helpless "objects" of impersonal "structural" forces over which they had no control. This is the danger of deterministic models: whether they explain the inflation in terms of external or internal distributional conflicts, they tend to understate the importance of political decisions. And simply because political decisions in the early years of the Weimar republic were reached by an exceptionally tortuous process does not mean they somehow reached themselves. Those involved in the debates and decisions on fiscal and monetary policy in 1920 would not have bothered had they been so impotent.

This article presents information related to the process of economic planning in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the 1930s. The economy of the Soviet Union is distinguished from that of capitalist economies by having both public ownership of property and centralized economic planning. This two-dimensional classification gives rise to questions about intermediate cases, particularly now that the Soviet economy is in the process of change. Economies with public ownership of property but not planning have been analyzed under the label of market socialism. actual socialist planning in the 1930s was closer to military mobilization than the market socialism of western theorists or postwar Yugoslavia. Although not a new view, this conclusion has dropped out of recent discussions of the Soviet economy and needs reemphasis. Second, the Nazi economy shared many characteristics with the dominant socialist economy of the time. The National Socialists were socialist in practice as well as in name. It is a mistake to think that the Soviets were in control of their economy, while the Nazis were not. Both economies were subject to the confusions that follow from implementing new and untried ideas. They were prey to the vagaries of large and chaotic bureaucracies.

The article examines the origins of war finance and inflation in Great Britain and Germany from 1914 to 1918. There was no significant difference between the fiscal policy of central government in Great Britain and the fiscal policy of those levels of government which in Germany discharged the same range of functions. Even in the sphere of local government, the main difference lay not in the aggregate borrowings, but in the immediacy with which in Germany it was monetized. Thus differing political and hence fiscal systems made little difference when it came to total war. The monetary effects of roughly the same rate of growth of public debt were far more expansionary in Germany than in Britain because of the inability to place much of it abroad, and because of the lack of money market demand in Germany for state floating debt. The failure of the German money market exercised a destabilizing effect on German economic conditions, first in the direction of inflation, then, once the Reichsbank law had been amended, in the direction of deflation. The German experience underlines the utility of the British money market in exercising a stabilizing influence on British economic conditions.

This article focuses on the process of economic and political change in Germany in the nineteenth century. The early phase of German industrialization was associated with low urban growth rates. Only in the kingdom of Saxony and the area around Berlin was there a significant increase in urbanization. However, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards there was a marked expansion in urban growth, particularly in the Rhineland and Westphalia, and, to a lesser extent, in Silesia. The nineteenth century witnessed a marked growth in the state bureaucracy and few would dispute the claim that Germany was well administered. However, if the regional distribution of sectoral development lay at the heart of the mechanism of industrialization there seems little evidence to support the claim that economic advance was itself a by-product of state action. If the role of the state was supportive in individual areas, such as vocational training, the official promotion of exports in the late nineteenth century and regional industrialization policies were generally a failure.

The article outlines several aspects of a comparative study of resources mobilization by the U.S., Great Britain, the Soviet Union and Germany before and during the Second World War. These include war preparations and mobilization needs, political leadership and the central coordination of resources and the intensity of resource mobilization. The most extensive economic burdens of war preparation were borne by Germany and the Soviet Union; British rearmament was run on an altogether smaller scale, and in the United States war preparations were almost nonexistent. By the late 1930s Germany was in a position to deploy formidable military assets. These assets depended only partly on her economy. A crucial ingredient in her military successes up to 1942 was her aggressive strategy of surprise and preemption in combined arms operations. Germany's prewar economic preparations were very substantial. The only country to attempt the building of a true military counterweight to German dispositions was the Soviet Union. Throughout the interwar years Soviet military-economic doctrines bad emphasized the permanent dangers of external aggression. In Soviet rearmament was mirrored Germany's drive toward a mass array possessing military-technical superiority, backed up by the mass production facilities of modernized and specialized defense industries.

The article focuses on the German banking crisis of 1931. The German interwar depression was much more severe than the crises which afflicted west European economies. Industrial production fell to 61 per cent of its 1929 level at the low point of the depression in 1932. The German banking crisis occurred not at the onset but in the middle of a general economic depression. In 1928 there were symptoms of a mild recession in German consumer industries, and from the middle of 1929 the production of heavy industry fell. There were signs of monetary crisis already in spring 1929, when a politically-induced foreign exchange run occurred during the meeting of the Paris Experts' Committee on reparations; the market feared that the experts would not be able to reach agreement on a new reparations plan. A similar run took place in September 1930, after the Nazi party did unexpectedly well in the Reichstag elections. In each case money flowed out of Germany; and in 1929 bank deposits in Germany fell.

This article examines the concept of Blitzkrieg economics to show that in most respects the concept does not fit with the facts of German economic life between 1936 and 1942. Historians argued that German dictator Adolf Hitler's plans were large in scale, not limited, and were intended for a major war of conquest to be fought considerably later than 1939. The fact that the large armament failed to materialize was not due to any Blitzkrieg conception, but to the fact that economic preparations were out of step with the course of foreign policy; a dislocation that was exacerbated after 1939 by a combination of poor planning, structural constraints within German industry, and weaknesses in the process of constructing and communicating policy. The intention was large-scale mobilization. If the idea of the Blitzkrieg economy is to work, it must be shown that Hitler, strongly influenced by short-term economic and political considerations, conceived of, planned and launched a war based on this economic policy in the late summer of 1939. Yet all the evidence or rather lacks of it suggests that short-term economic and social considerations played only the smallest part in Hitler's foreign policy calculations.

The article discusses the political nature and motivation of bilateral clearing agreements in Germany from 1934 through 1938. Exchanger controls, both formal and informal, were put into operation by most countries during the international financial crisis of the early 1930s. By the beginning of 1934, when recovery was beginning in most European economies, the future of both domestic and foreign expansion lay in pawn to the political decisions to be made concerning the future extent of exchange controls special trade agreements. In September 1934, Germany's course became clear. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Finance under Adolf Hitler, announced his "New Plan" which continued and centralized Germany's foreign-exchange controls. Twenty-five supervisory centers allocated available foreign exchange for import transactions approved by the state. To facilitate trade under this regime of direct controls, bilateral clearing agreements were concluded with a number of countries, especially in central Europe and South America, in which foreigners in German markets credited German purchases against offset purchases.

This article presents a reply by the author to the comments of G.F.R. Spenceley about his article "Cars, Roads, and Economic Recovery in Germany, 1932-8," previously published in the journal "Economic History Review." The author says that the purpose of his original article was simply to explore a neglected theme. The intention was to demonstrate that the motor transport sector made a significant contribution to speeding up the general revival. He says that the initial purpose seemed to him a very necessary one and still seems so, while in terms of the evidence, the conclusion is neither exaggerated nor misleading. He says that Spenceley is, however, unhappy both with the scope of the general conclusion and with the nature of some of the evidence used. Some of his criticisms are a little misleading and need to be looked at in some detail. He says that Spenceley next contends that he has deliberately misled the reader as to the scope and nature of the motor-transport sector and of its linkages. This point, too, needs closer examination, beginning with the question of employment.

This article examines the relationship between early markets and hundredal organizations in England before 1200. The separate development of economic and legal studies has caused the original problem to recede from view, so that the relevant questions are no nearer an answer now than they were seventy years ago. Yet the extent to which private trade in the early Middle Ages was facilitated, obstructed, or regulated by the institutions of government has enough interest to merit investigation for its own sake as well as for its bearing on the development of marketing institutions in later and better-documented periods. A considerable number of apparently hundredal markets have no recorded existence before the thirteenth century, by which time their right to exist, in the absence of a charter, would be by prescription. The association between markets and local government, which is implicit in the existence of English hundredal markets, has earlier parallels from late Carolingian France and Ottonian Germany. The king's responsibilities for ensuring food supplies, regulating weights, measures, and currency, and preserving the peace, all made markets worthy of his supervision.

The article describes the business cycle in Germany during the 1920s. The economic data are used to demonstrate that there was a credit shortage in the country at the onset of the 1926 and 1929 depressions. There were exogenously determined declines in imports of foreign capital during 1926 and 1929. The traditional view of the role of foreign capital is needed. The whole basis of the internal German economy was weak in the 1920s. The search for single-cause explanations of a downturn in economic activity raises the objection that the complex nature of economic interrelations involves a variety of elements.

The article examines the economic conditions in Germany from 1919-1920. The events of 1919-1920 were responsible for the subsequent problems of the British inter-war economy. There seems general agreement that the coming of the "eight-hour day" in 1919-20 was an event of minor economic consequence. The author attempts to establish the credentials of the wage series customarily used in discussion of the inflation of 1919-1920. Secondly, it constructs a hours index on a monthly basis for 1919-1920 and set a hourly equivalents to the weekly wage series. Lastly, shifting the focus from employee to employer, the author briefly explores the impact of hours reductions on unit labor costs.

This article focuses on the duty-free entry provided by German states, the Zollverein, for British imported iron from 1842 to 1845. Careful study in detail of governmental actions during this decade helps substantiate the view that the repeal of the Corn Laws was in fact no dramatic reversal of previous policies but merely the culmination of them. Two determinants appear to have been at work in shaping these policies. From the time of Peel's accession to power, the government had been attempting to extend England's trade through rationalization of the tariff and concomitant use of this rationalization as leverage in negotiating a more favourable tariff climate abroad. Secondly, leading members of the industrial community were applying increasing pressure in the direction of policies and measures which would actively assist the marketing of their products. British iron output had increased sharply, beginning in the late 1830's and extending into the 1840's, partly in response to the rapidly growing domestic demand from the manufacturers of railroad equipment, chiefly rails, partly as a result of the over rapid development of the new Scottish fields.

The article compares the author's previously published article with an article by Malcolm Falkus, on the origins of the German economic downturn in 1929. The author says that in his article he assigned a central role in the origin of the German depression to inventory fluctuations. He said that recent research into the determinants of inventory investment in the United States has failed to uncover any significant or consistent relationship between credit conditions and inventory investment. He concluded that it is entirely unreasonable to hypothesize a relationship between inventories and credit conditions in Germany in the late 1920's strong enough to explain the change in the former by changes in the latter. Falkus, in contrast, asserts that, as emphasized by contemporaries, monetary stringency was inducing industries to cut back inventories. Falkus's evidence comes in three parts. First, there is a citation to the contemporary opinion mentioned in the passage just quoted. Second, Falkus asserts that the levels of income and of inventory investment are in part jointly determined, and that one cannot simply assume a one-way line of causation.