Search results

As the gateway to the Californian goldfields, San Francisco experienced a demographic shock that had a lasting impact on its economy. Some writers see San Francisco's growth as having a parasitic influence on the city's hinterland through the anti‐competitive behaviour of some corporations and the destruction of natural resources. I argue that San Francisco generated more productive external effects through the formation of human and social capital in the city itself, and by investment in further resource development elsewhere in California.

Government is one of the crucial institutions that shape the development of economies and in a recent issue of this journal H. M. Boot contributed a useful survey of its effects on Australia during the colonial period. Boot emphasized the beneficial effects of government in terms of creating stability and secure property rights, but also argued that important decisions about capital works came to be influenced more by political expediency than by sound economic criteria. This flawed decision‐making process created a significant field of unproductive investments which 'crowded out' private‐sector activity and weakened the economy. The purpose of this article is to examine this argument closely and critically. It will argue that there is no evidence to support the contention that politicians saw public works simply as an opportunity to buy votes and that an awareness of the costs of unproductive investment forced Parliament to use market‐based criteria to assess proposed spending. The article will suggest an alternative explanation of the failure of the private sector to generate sufficient investment to increase the rate of economic growth, and of the extent to which public investment crowded out the private sector.

This article examines the contribution of the urban sector to Australian economic development before the First World War. This contribution has often been seen in negative terms: contemporary observers generally thought that the major cities were to large and drained resources from the productive sectors of the economy, while some modern historians have portrayed cities as centres of poverty and environmental disamenity. The article evaluates these claims and presents a case for the urban sector having been a powerful stimulus to economic growth. The problems which Australian urbanization created did not stem from cities being too large, with more inhabitants than the number of well‐paying jobs; rather, the general preference for low‐density suburban living, and the ability of most of the population to be able to afford to live that way, meant that the cities would be expensive to build and difficult to service in a cost‐effective way.

The debate about the ability of Third World cities today and in the future to cope with rapid population growth has taken place with virtually no reference to urban history. This article seeks to remedy that, examining how three of Asia's largest cities during the pre-modern period coped with the problem of major fires. It examines the nature of the problem, its causes and its economic significance. The article concludes by considering the implications of this history for the current debate.