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In this essay, Nicholas Tarling, Professor of History at The University of Auckland from 1968 to 1996, reflects on the nature of history-writing and on the nature of the historiography of Southeast Asia. It will be of interest to students of Southeast Asia and to those who think about history, read it, and write it.

Main description: Der Umgang mit dem Wald im 18. Jahrhundert wird oft vereinfacht dargestellt: Es herrscht das Bild von Landesherren vor, die mit klugen Forstgesetzen den Wald vor Übernutzung schützen wollten, aber einer uneinsichtigen Landbevölkerung gegenüberstanden, die mit ihrem Vieh und Brennholzbedarf die Baumbestände ruinierte. Ernst hinterfragt diese gängige Auffassung mit einer Fallstudie über Holzproduktion, Landwirtschaft und Jagd in den Mittelgebirgen Hunsrück und Eifel und lenkt unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf die existentielle Herausforderung der damaligen Zeit, die Waldentwicklung gesellschafts- und naturverträglich zu gestalten. Erstmalig erkennen wir dadurch das vielschichtige, multipolare Politik- und Konfliktfeld Waldentwicklung: Forstgesetze waren oft genug schlicht Ergebnis innerobrigkeitlicher Händel. Nachhaltigkeit und Holznot interessierten die Obrigkeit vornehmlich, um im Schatten dieser Begriffe die Waldbestände planmäßig "versilbern" zu können. Doch vor Gericht opponierte die Landbevölkerung kenntnis- und auch erfolgreich gegen dieses Doppelspiel. Damit kann Ernst beispielhaft für das Waldwesen die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Obrigkeit und Untertanen einerseits, Realität und Rhetorik andererseits herausarbeiten. Aus der Presse: "Wir verdanken Christoph Ernst das mit großem Fleiß zusammengetragene Kompendium der Waldgeschichte in den Ländern an der Mosel." Hansjörg Küster, in: FAZ 17.10.2001

This discussion paper deals with the reconstruction of transportation and telecommunication infrastructures in Eastern Germany and especially Saxony after the 1990 unification. Following a representation of investment measures and their influence on capital stocks in transportation infrastructure the author discusses the infrastructural situation of Saxony s three main agglomerations Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz and their location in European economic space. Concluding the paper Saxony s integration into the system of Transeuropean Networks and their planned extensions into Central and Eastern Europe is briefly examined.

Labor mobility is crucial for an efficient allocation of resources and the transition economies are often viewed as suffering from inadequate reallocation of labor. Using quarterly micro data for the 1994-1998 period, we provide a comparative analysis of the extent and determinants of labor mobility in the Czech Republic. We show there has been significant movement into the finance, trade, and tourism sectors and out of the agricultural and industrial sectors. Over half of the people who change jobs have changed sector of employment, and this restructuring has been carried out relatively efficiently in that it occurred with lower incidence and duration of unemployment than in the other transition economies. The demographic characteristics of different patterns of mobility are similar across these transition economies: we identify younger people in general and single men as individuals who more likely to change jobs or become unemployed. The more educated are experiencing more job stability and are more likely to be hired if unemployed or out of the labor force. Finally, we find in the Czech Republic, the flows between employment and unemployment are very responsive to demand conditions. Hence, we conclude that the Czech labor market is demonstrating flexibility and efficiency in the transition.

We develop a simple search equilibrium model of workplace training and education based on two features. First, investment in education improves job-related learning skills and reduces training costs burdened by firms. Second, firms with vacant skilled job slots can choose between recruitment from the market and training. Compared to Germany and Japan, the US has both a higher inflow rate into unemployment and a higher efficiency of the matching process. While the combined effort of these differences on the share of educated labor is ambiguous, the effect on the percentage of firms undertaking workplace training is to unambiguously reduce it.