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The causes of the USA's exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India. Habakkuk's views on the causes of American industrial pre-eminence are reassessed. While the USA had abundant natural resources, they did not promote manufacturing since international trade equalized prices in Britain and the USA or American tariffs made resources dearer in the USA. Wages were higher in the USA than in Britain since labor markets were tightly integrated and labor was drawn to the USA as the continent was settled. Capital services were also more expensive in USA. American industrialization required tariffs since virtually all input prices were higher than in Britain and industrial productivity was comparable. America's comparative advantage shifted from agriculture to manufacturing after 1895 was industrial productivity soured. This was due to a fall in energy prices in the USA, the American policy of mass schooling which increased the supply of skilled adults and induced firms to invent technology to raise their productivity since the supply of child labor was restricted in comparison to Britain, and the great growth of manufacturing investment induced by the tariff which provide a large market for inventions and generated technical knowledge through learning by doing. Egypt and India could not have industrialized by following American policies since their wages were so low and their energy costs so high that the modern technology that was cost effective in Britain and the USA would not have paid in their circumstances. The development of Egypt and India required more draconian state intervention than a protective tariff, mass education, and infrastructure investment - the American model.

New technologies have not always been greeted with full enthusiasm. Although the Ottomans were quick to adopt advancements in military technology, they waited almost three centuries to sanction printing in Ottoman Turkish (in Arabic characters). Printing spread relatively rapidly throughout Europe following the invention of the printing press in 1450 despite resistance by interest groups and temporary restrictions in some countries. We explain differential reaction to technology through a political economy approach centered on the legitimizing relationships between rulers and their agents (e.g., military, religious, or secular authorities). The Ottomans regulated the printing press heavily to prevent the loss it would have caused to the ruler’s net revenue by undermining the legitimacy provided by religious authorities. On the other hand, the legitimizing relationship between European religious and political authorities was undermined over a century prior to the invention of the press. European rulers thus had little reason to stop the spread of printing as public policy, nor could the Church have stopped it had it wanted to. The Ottomans eventually sanctioned printing in Arabic script in the 18th century after alternative sources of legitimacy emerged.

The success of Danish agricultural exports at the end of the nineteenth century is often attributed to the establishment of a direct trade with Britain. Previously, exports went mostly via Hamburg, but this changed with the loss of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia in the war of 1864. After this, quantity and price data imply narrowing price gaps and thus imply gains for Danish producers. Why then did Denmark not discover the British market earlier? We show that butter markets in both countries were integrated in the eighteenth century, but through the Hamburg hub. We then demonstrate that there were sound economic reasons for this well into the nineteenth century. However, movements to establish a direct trade were afoot from the 1850s. Thus, although the war certainly gave an extra boost to the process, the shock from the loss of the Duchies was not necessary for the future Danish success.

We examine the case of an important outsider to the Cobden-Chevalier network of bilateral treaties in the second half of the nineteenth century. We attempt to explain this through a study of the structure of Danish trade and protection. We demonstrate, in contrast to previous accounts that have considered Danish trade policy somewhat irrational, that Denmark was right to remain outside. She had little to gain from concluding treaties, since her main trading partners offered free trade for her exports, agricultural goods, and she needed her own tariffs for revenue purposes.

Technology appears to be making fine-scale charging (as in tolls on roads that depend on time of day or even on current and anticipated levels of congestion) increasingly feasible. Such charging also appears to be increasingly desirable, as traffic on roads continues to grow and costs and public opposition limit new construction. Similar incentives towards fine-scale charging also appear to be operating in communications and other areas, such as electricity usage. Standard economic theory supports such measures and technology is being developed and deployed to implement them. But their spread is not very rapid and their prospects for the future are uncertain. This paper presents a collection of sketches, ranging from ancient history to very recent developments, that illustrate the costs that charging imposes. Some of those costs are explicit (in terms of the monetary costs to users and the costs of implementing the charging mechanisms). Others are implicit, such as the time or the mental processing costs of users. These argue that the case for fine-scale charging is not unambiguous and that in many cases such charging may lead to undesirable outcomes.

The notion of development blocks (Dahmen, 1950, 1991) suggests the co-evolution of technologies and industries through complementarities and the overcoming of imbalances. This study proposes and applies a methodology to analyse development blocks empirically. To assess the extent and character of innovational interdependencies between industries the study combines analysis of innovation biographies and statistical network analysis. This is made possible by using data from a newly constructed innovation output database for Sweden. The study finds ten communities of closely related industries in which innovation activity has been prompted by the emergence of technological imbalances or by the exploitation of new technological opportunities. The communities found in the Swedish network of innovation are shown to be stable over time and often characterized by strong user-supplier interdependencies. These findings serve to stress how historical imbalances and opportunities are key to understanding the dynamics of the long-run development of industries and new technologies.

In 1901, six Australian states joined together in political and economic union, creating an internal free trade area and adopting a common external tariff. This paper investigates the impact of federation on Australia's internal and international trade flows by studying changes in the "border effect" over this time. This is possible because Australian states reported intra-Australian trade prior to 1901 and for eight years after federation. The results indicate that federation itself produced little change in Australia's trade patterns, but that the border effect increased substantially between 1906 and 1909 when the protectionist Lyne Tariff was imposed.

Industrial production imposes geographical, economic and cultural distances between producers and consumers. The concept of constituting 'missing objects' can help shrink these distances by enabling actors to engage in discourses and practices about contexts beyond what is materially present. Since the mid-1990s, food miles have emerged as an example of missing objects, representing the distance that agricultural products travel from the farm to the dining table, and the environmental effects of transportation. I analyse how consumers, farmers, activists, industry and policy-makers in the United States and Europe are building agency in making and using food miles.

The common European electricity market requires both market integration and transmission grid expansion, including trans-border interconnectors. Although the benefits of increased interconnectivity are widely acknowledged, expansion of interconnectors is often very slow. This paper gathers insights on the reasons behind this "grid-lock" drawing on the study of the German-Polish border. Although two interconnectors already exist, the trade is blocked by unplanned electricity loop flows. A third interconnector has been discussed for years, but saw little progress in spite of declarations of support on both sides. Drawing on the existing literature on the topic of grid expansion we identify four hypotheses for the grid-lock: inadequate financing; diverging interests; governance and administration problems; and different actors' motivations, trust and security perceptions. We evaluate them using the empirical material gathered through document analysis and stakeholder interviews conducted in Germany and Poland. None of the hypotheses on its own can explain the "gridlock". However, while financing has not been a major obstacle, divergent interests had an impact on the project delay, administrative and governance problems are a great hindrance on the technical level, while motivations influence interstate political relations and policy shaping. EU support and closer bilateral cooperation provide opportunities to address these challenges.

We investigate the costs of transportation regulation using the example of agricultural markets in the United States. Using a large database of prices by state of agricultural commodities, we find that the coefficient of variation (as a measure of market integration between states) falls for many commodities until the First World War. We demonstrate that this reflected changes in transportation costs which in turn in the long run depended on productivity growth in railroads. 1920 marked a change in this relationship, however, and between the First and Second World Wars we find considerable disintegration of agricultural markets, ultimately as a consequence of the 1920 Transportation Act. We argue that this benefited railroad companies in the 1920s and workers in the 1930s, and we put forward an estimate of the welfare losses for the consumers of railroad services (i.e. agricultural producers and final consumers).

Private and public concern about digital security, cybercrime and data privacy is growing the last few years. If Internet-related markets are flexible enough to cope with security concerns, given time, one would expect that - per unit of Internet traffic - the number and costs of cybersecurity incidents fall over time. This paper is a first attempt to assess empirically whether overall Internet traffic growth has grown faster than the number of cybersecurity incidents. The conclusion is that, overall, the Internet has over time has become a safer place when measured by the number of security incidents per unit of transmitted data. The implication is that the current surge in reported cyberincidents is primarily driven by the growth in scale and pervasiveness of Internet communication exchange. There are a number of caveats that should be taken into account, but for this more consistent and reliable cybersecurity statistics would be required than are available at present.

World trade has grown rapidly. Several factors are highlighted by literature as a driving force behind the growth of world trade. Reduction in barriers to trade is one of them. A comprehensive empirical investigation is carried to ascertain the trade reducing and increasing effect of barriers to trade which are also known determinants of trade. The modified gravity model developed in this study analyses the effect of GDP, distance,remittances, FDI, transportation cost, exchange rate, inflation, population, import and export on trade flows. The study revealed that the population, import and transportation cost, distance, Tariff imposed by trading partner, FDI and Population of trading country are the determinants and significantly affect exports of developing economies. The study also ascertain that transportation cost, distance, population of trading partner, FDI of both trading countries and remittances of trading partner are the determinants that have major impact on import of developing nations.

This research investigates the interdependency between independent variables (Increase of pricing strategy adaptation, Increase of export intensity, Firm's commitment to exporting, Export market development, Export market competition, Past Pricing Strategy Adaptation, Past Export Performance Satisfaction, Past Export Intensity, Export market distance) and dependent variables (i.e. Expected Short-Term Export Performance improvement) of export performance. The framework is tested via a survey through questionnaire from industrial exporters of textile in Pakistan. Findings revealed that the past export performance satisfaction is positively correlated with Expected Short-Term Export Performance and it is the only important indicator that is associated significantly to short-term export performance improvement in textile sector of Pakistan.

The usual story of the “first era of globalization” at the end of the nineteenth century sees Denmark as something as an outlier: a country which, like Britain, resisted the globalization backlash in the wake of the inflow of cheap grain from the New World, but where agriculture, rather than going into decline, in fact flourished. Key to the success of Danish agriculture was an early diversification towards dairy production. We dispute this simple story which sees Denmark as something of a liberal paragon. Denmark’s success owed much to a prudent use of trade policy which favoured dairy production. Moreover, this favouritism continued even after a more general movement to free trade in the 1860s. Using micro-level data from individual dairies, we quantify the implied subsidy to dairy production from the tariffs, and demonstrate that this in many cases ensured the profitability of individual dairies.

The paper studies how the risks specific to a nuclear power investment in liberalised markets – regulatory, construction, operation and market risks – can be mitigated or transferred away from the plant investor through different contractual and organisational arrangements. It argues that at least for the first new reactors significant risk transfers onto governments, consumers, and, vendors are likely to be needed to make nuclear power attractive to investors in liberalised markets. These different types of risk allocations will in turn induce different investment financing choices. Four case studies of recent new nuclear projects illustrate the alternative consistent combinations of contractual, organization, and financial arrangements for new nuclear build depending on the industrial organisation, the market position of the company and the institutional environment prevailing in different countries. The most likely financing structure will likely be based on corporate financing or some form of hybrid arrangement backed by the balance sheet of one or a consortium of large vertically integrated companies.

It is well known that day-ahead prices in power markets exhibit spikes and time-varying volatility. Spikes and extremely high volatility are the results of (short-term) frictions in demand and/or supply conditions. It is known that information on load or the reserve margin help to forecast spikes. However, these variables are not (timely) available for every market participant and this paper suggests to use temperature as a proxy. Interpreting the results from several switching-regimes models, the paper shows that the probability of spike occurrence increases when temperature deviates substantially from mean temperature levels.

prices of traded goods relative to nontraded goods. The results suggest that the 30 percent average import tariff gave about a 17 percent implicit subsidy to import-competing producers and effectively taxed exporters at about 10 percent. Tariffs redistributed large amounts of income (about 8 percent of GDP), but the effect on consumers was roughly neutral. F or most of the nineteenth century the United States exported raw materials and food (cotton and tobacco from the South and wheat and corn from the Midwest) and imported manufactured goods. One of the most controversial aspects of U.S. economic policy in the decades after the Civil War was the use of high import tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers (located mainly in the North) from foreign competition. Tariff advocates claimed that high import duties helped American workers by expanding industrial employment and keeping wages high, while also giving farmers a steady demand in the home market for the food and raw materials that they produced. Tariff critics charged that those import duties raised the cost of living for consumers and harmed agricultural producers by effectively taxing their exports, thus redistributing income from consumers and farmers to benefit big businesses and capital-owners in the North. This protectionist trade policy was a contentious issue in American national politics during the Gilded Age of the 1880s. After post-Civil War reconstruction ended with the election compromise in 1877, tariff policy became the major source of partisan conflict: Republicans defended high protective tariffs and Democrats demanded that the tariff be used only to raise revenue. The election of 1888 hinged on the issue of tariff reform, and although the Democratic candidate (Grover Cleveland) won more popular votes, the Republican candidate (Benjamin

Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures (1791) is a classic document in the history of U.S. economic policy, but its fate in Congress is not well known. It is commonly believed that the report was never implemented. Although Hamilton's proposals for bounties (subsidies) failed to receive support, virtually every tariff recommendation put forward in the report was adopted by Congress in early 1792. These tariffs were not highly protectionist duties because Hamilton feared discouraging imports, which were the critical tax base on which he planned to fund the public debt. Indeed, because Hamilton's policy toward manufacturing was one of encouragement and not protection, those interests shifted their political support from the Federalists to the Jeffersonian Republicans during the 1790s.

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs, governing the textile trades between the Low Countries, northern France, and Italy, to the establishment of an effective and ‘permanent’ direct sea-route between Italy and north-west Europe from the early 14th century (though the first, a Genoese galley, can be dated to 1277). In my paper, I contend that a spreading stain of chronic, continuous warfare throughout western Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the 1290s, leading into the Hundred Years’ War (1336-1453), with a consequent sharp rise in transport and transaction costs in international trade, was instead the major factor in the decline of the Champagne Fairs, in the concomitant decline of the overland continental trade routes associated with them, and with a forced shift to the maritime trading routes between Italy and north-west Europe. During this war-torn, plague-disrupted period of economic contraction, up to the 1450s, the costs of shipping luxury woollens by the maritime route was certainly cheaper than by overland routes; but the relative cost of the maritime route was still higher than the cost of transporting cheap textiles (says) overland in the late 13th century. Indeed, this steep rise in late-medieval transaction costs in international trade had forced the north-western European textile industries to give up the export of the very cheap, light textiles and focus instead on luxury woollens that could better ‘bear the freight’. Subsequently, however, from the 1450s, with the establishment of alternative, more easterly overland routes in areas free from warfare, principally via the Rhine, then with the restoration of relative peace after the end of the Hundred Years’ War, and with the South German silver-copper mining boom, the overland continental trade routes rapidly revived, and with them a series of newer continental-trade based fairs (Antwerp, Frankfurt, Geneva, Lyons). During the later 15th and 16th centuries, these continental trade routes and their associated fair-system were virtually the sole mechanism by which textiles from north-west Europe were exported to Italy and the Mediterranean basin, because, inter alia, the overland distance from the Antwerp Fairs to Venice was only about 20% of the distance by the often hazardous sea routes. The principal textiles involved in this overland, trans-continental trade were : luxury-quality English woollens, medium-quality kerseys, and especially the very cheap, light Flemish says from the revived sayetteries, which had become the principal textile industry of the southern Low Countries. The paper concludes by examining the various factors and forces that led to a fall in transport and transaction costs in the international textile trades, via the overland routes, including river routes, between north-west Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the later 15th to early 17th centuries (i.e. to the eve of the Thirty Years War, which again seriously disrupted the overland, continental routes).

Countries may utilize a long coastline in relation to their landmass as a resource to develop their maritime economy. This paper argues that ASEAN countries differ in utilizing their maritime potential. As a basis for further comparative studies the Center for Policy Research and International Studies (CenPRIS) in Penang developed a set of indicators to measure the maritime potential of nations, the state of their maritime industries, and the degree to which the maritime potential has actually been utilized. Using the CenPRIS Ocean Index (COI) shows that Brunei and the Philippines have underutilized their maritime potentials, whereas Singapore and Thailand have made full use of it. Malaysia still has the potential to further develop its maritime economy.