Suchergebnisse

A reminder that war is not always, or even generally, good for long-term growth Many believe that despite its destructive character, war ultimately boosts long-term economic growth. For the United States this view is often supported by appeal to the experience of the Second World War, understood as a triumph of both production and productivity. Alexander Field shows that between 1941 and 1945 manufacturing productivity actually declined, depressed by changes in the output mix and resource shocks from enemy action, including curtailed access to natural rubber and, on the Eastern Seaboard, petroleum. The war forced a shift away from producing goods in which the country had a great deal of experience toward those in which it had little. Learning by doing was only a partial counterbalance to the intermittent idleness and input hoarding that characterized a shortage economy and dragged down productivity. The conflict distorted human and physical capital accumulation and once it ended, America stopped producing most of the new goods. The war temporarily shut down basic scientific research and the ongoing development of civilian goods. U.S. world economic dominance in 1948, Field shows, was due less to the experience of making war goods and more to the country's productive potential in 1941

Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Notes on Japanese names and terminology; Introduction; A contemporary 'workers' inquiry'; Outline; Notes; 1. Fukushima; The perspective of autonomy; Fukushima and the capitalist developmental state; Precarious times in post-industrial Tokyo; Notes; 2. Genpatsu Yamero!; A breath of fresh air; Dance to demonstration; Genpatsu Yamero as a temporary autonomous zone; Shiro-to no Ran's post-industrial; Demonstrating saves electricity; The politics of festive noise; Notes; 3. Tokyo Nantoka.

Aggregate economic activity was heavily influenced by the construction sector's expansion, collapse, and failure to revive during the interwar years. The 1920s building boom was the first to respond to the potential of the automobile and the last to be largely unplanned. Its uncoordinated character slowed the growth of full employment output toward the end of the 1920s. The physical and legal detritus of unregulated land development posed continuing obstacles to recovery during the second half of the 1930s.

The contribution to growth of telegraphic- as opposed to rail-speed transmission of financial asset and commodity price data remains unclear. With more certainty we can identify savings in the holdings of real capital—savings made possible by the use of the telegraph at the firm level to implement tight systems of logistical control.

Detailed study of Soviet arms transfers to the Middle East. Such transfers have traditionally been the principal instrument of Soviet effort to influence local governments. The author points out that increasingly these arms transfers are pursued more as a hard currency than of influence, in part because the Soviets have discovered the limitations of aid relationship. (DÜI-Hns)

Virtually all sectors of the nineteenth-century American economy were less capital-intensive than their British counterparts. This resulted from persistently higher American interest/profit rates, due in turn to American land abundance. The paper adduces the evidence in support of these propositions, and explores their interrelationships through the use of a linear model inspired by the writings of David Ricardo.