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The Hawaiian archipelago was the last major land area on the planet to be settled, with Polynesians making the long voyage just under a millennium ago. Building on new archaeological and historical research, the lecture provides an overview of the economic and political history of Hawai'i from the first Polynesian settlements in the thirteen century through U.S. colonisation and statehood. The analysis considers how the political and economic institutions that emerged and evolved in Hawai'i during its centuries of global isolation changed in response to Hawai'i's post‐1778 integration into a new world of global markets and colonial politics.

The introduction of commercial jet service in 1959 transformed the face of the Hawaiian Islands. By reducing both the time required to travel to Hawai'i and the money price of travel, the jet plane brought increasing numbers of tourists to Hawai'i, and in the process, triggered an enormous wave of development on the four major islands. Mansel Blackford's new book focuses on how tourism affected the development of Maui, a beautiful tropical island of just 727 square miles. In 1956 Maui had unspoiled, beautiful beaches; sugar cane and pineapple as the main industries; small towns with a relaxed lifestyle; just 37,600 residents; and only 29,000 annual visitors. By 1998 Maui had been totally transformed. The population had more than tripled to 121,000 residents; the annual visitor count had soared to 2,244,000 people; only two sugar plantations remained; bumper-to-bumper traffic jams had become the norm; planned resorts in Wailea and K\bar{{\rm a}}'anapali and a more sprawling tourism complex in Kihei were clustered around the most beautiful beaches; and the small rural towns had grown into tourism and commercial centers.

In this Journal, Sukkoo Kim investigates the sources of income convergence and divergence across regions in the United States. Kim argues that there are two sources of income convergence in regional economies linked by trade: convergence in regional wage rates and convergence in regional industry mixes. Using U.S. regional data on industry mix and worker income by industry, Kim decomposes differences in regional incomes into industry wage and industry-mix components. From his decompositions, Kim concludes that changing regional industrial structures "played an important role in causing the divergence and convergence of U.S. regional income per capita" in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries..

This is a new analysis of recent changes in important Japanese institutions. It addresses the origin, development, and recent adaptation of core institutions, including financial institutions, corporate governance, lifetime employment, and the amakudari system. After four decades of rapid economic growth in Japan, the 1990s saw the country enter a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Policy reforms were initially half-hearted, and businesses were slow to restructure as the global economy changed. The lagging economy has been impervious to aggressive fiscal stimulus measures and has been plagued by ongoing price deflation for years. Japan's struggle has called into question the ability of the country's economic institutions, originally designed to support factor accumulation and rapid development, to adapt to the new economic environment of the twenty-first century. This book discusses both historical and international comparisons including Meiji Japan, and recent economic and financial reforms in Korea, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and New Zealand, placing the current institutional changes in perspective. The contributors argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom that Japanese institutions have remained relatively rigid, there has been significant institutional change over the last decade.

AbstractWe examine the formation of property rights in land during the early settlement by the Dutch of the Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. After its founding in 1652 as a provisioning outpost for ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the colonial government promoted settlement initially by granting land with well‐specified and enforced property rights in restricted zones near Cape Town. By 1714 it transitioned to accommodate rapidly expanding settlement by creating a weaker form of property rights, the loan farm, which was imprecisely defined and had limited government enforcement. We develop a profit‐maximizing monopsony model to explain the VOC's choice to transition from the better‐specified land grant to the less well‐specified loan farm. We conclude that the decline in the population size and ability of the Khoikhoi, the Cape's original inhabitants, to organize effective resistance to the Dutch invasion was critical to the transition, as it lowered the costs of private enforcement of settlers' territorial claims. The choice of property rights thus enabled and encouraged the rapid taking by European settlers of the western Cape of Africa for the expansion of the Dutch colony's pastoral economy.