Suchergebnisse

In the interwar period, Japanese textile firms were able to greatly increase labor efficiency and become the world's main exporter of cotton textiles. Meanwhile, the Indian industry stagnated and was forced to retreat behind tariff walls. This paper argues that the flexibility of the Japanese work force stemmed from its high turnover; the Indian laborers were collectively inflexible in defending lifetime careers against technical changes that reduced labor demand. As the industry requires only a few easily acquired skills, a committed work force was actually a disadvantage to Indian management.

The textbook explanation for Britain's high unemployment in the 1920s is that the return to gold at $4.86 left the currency overvalued. Recent estimates suggest that an 11 percent devaluation would have eliminated roughly half the unemployment in 1925. This article questions the validity of that conclusion. It measures the power of exchange rate devaluations to decrease unemployment in the context of sectorally distinct labor markets. The results suggest that though a devaluation would have been helpful, eliminating half of 1925's unemployment would have required one much greater than 11 percent and would have caused significant price pressures.

Britain's textile industry contracted sharply in the interwar period due to the growth of domestic industries in many of its export markets. Lazonick and Mass argue that, because this growth was inevitable, British entrepreneurs should not have focused on the less developed countries. This article questions whether the interwar growth of the Indian textile industry was inevitable. A quantitative study of Indian import demand and production techniques suggests that the rapid growth of the industry was due to exogenous events—postwar British inflation and change in the Indian political regime—rather than to the natural evolution of Indian productivity.

Chapter 1: Specializations in Switzerland in the Nineteenth Century: Evolution of Trade Patterns and Growth Model; Léo Charles -- Chapter 2: Trends and Institutional Sources of Financing Russia's Human Capital Formation (Late 19th - Early 21st centuries); Dmitry V. Didenko -- Chapter 3: The Past's Long Shadow: A Systematic Review and Network Analysis of Economic History; Gregori Galofré-Vilà -- Chapter 4: Improving Deflators for Estimating Canadian Economic Growth, 1870-1900; Vincent Geloso and Michael Hinton -- Chapter 5: The Political Economy of State-Chartered Banks in Early 20th Century Texas; Linda M. Hooks -- Chapter 6: The Antebellum Slave Trade: Numbers and Impact on the Balance of Payments; Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson.

In this new volume of Research in Economic History, editors Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott bring together a cast of expert contributors to vigorously interrogate and analyze historic economics questions, looking across the political economy of the US, European history, and longstanding economic debates.

Front Cover; Research in Economic History; Copyright Page; Contents; List of Contributors; Introduction; Prices, Wages, and the Cost of Living in Old Republic São Paulo: 1891-1930; The Forgotten Half of Finance: Working-class Saving in Late Nineteenth-century New Jersey; Heights across the Last 2,000 Years in England; Monetary Policy and the Copper Price Bust: A Reassessment of the Causes of the 1907 Panic; Multiple Core Regions: Regional Inequality in Switzerland, 1860-2008; Index