Economic History eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Captain James Sutherland of Duffus","authors":"E. Sutherland","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3534959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3534959","url":null,"abstract":"James Sutherland (1747-1827) styled himself ‘of Duffus’, and Captain long after leaving the army, and in his last days was Lord Duffus. He perpetrated one of the most scandalous elopements of the eighteenth century with the 17 year-old wife of his commanding officer, only to abandon her three days later when confronted by General Scott. Over the decades he committed numberless adulteries and fathered a great many children, never marrying any of their mothers. He forced his brother-in-law to sign a lease or tack on his estates in Caithness, milking them for fourteen years until his nephew was old enough to inherit. At his next tack he was known as the Tyrant of Burray, one of the Orkney Isles. Miraculously, the title of his rebellious grandfather was restored and when he died he was able to leave substantial sums to a handful of his ‘natural’ children and to their children.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116439126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Economic Overview Lebanon","authors":"Jamile Youssef","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3519485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3519485","url":null,"abstract":"Since October 17, 2019, thousands of Lebanese all over Lebanon flood the streets furious with the economy collapse and requesting “all government parties out.” The anti-government protest, or what is called “October Revolution” is the largest since almost 15 years, with no support of any political party. The October 17 Revolution did not start out of the blue, Lebanon had been facing dramatic economic drawbacks from 2009, where GDP growth reached 10.1% at the mentioned year and started to decline ever since to 0.2% in 2019 (Blominvest Bank, 2018). According to the Central Intelligence Agency 2017, Lebanon ranked the 3rd highest country with Debt to GDP ratio as it recorded 152.8%, this ratio compares country’s public debt to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125936574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The ‘Place of the Phillips Curve’ in Macroeconometric Models: The Case of the Fed Board’s Model (1966–1980s)","authors":"A. Rancan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3517231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3517231","url":null,"abstract":"The article reconstructs how the Phillips curve was embedded into the Fed-MIT-Penn macroeconometric model of the late 1960s. My aim is to integrate James Forder’s (2014) narrative about the Phillips curve myth by looking at the macroeconometric model that should have been devoted to guide the Fed Board monetary policy. It is argued that the academic debate on the vertical Phillips curve did not affect the building of the wage and price block, which remained almost unchanged throughout the 1970s and 1980s.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128383141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How the East was Lost: Coevolution of Institutions and Culture in the 16th Century Portuguese Empire","authors":"Bernardo Mueller, João Gabriel Ayello Leite","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3548654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3548654","url":null,"abstract":"In 1498 Portuguese explorers discovered the sea route to Asia and for nearly 100 years no other nation managed to follow suit. This monopoly allowed Portugal to establish a vast maritime empire that positioned it to dominate the intercontinental trade in spices and other valuable goods between Asia and Europe, until then the domain of caravans through the Levant. But despite their superior navigation technology and military power, the Portuguese failed to exploit their lead. Even before the British and Dutch finally managed to reach Asia by sea, a century later, the Portuguese enterprise in Asia was already in decline. The literature on the remarkable rise and fall of the Portuguese empire is divided between those that ascribe the decline to culture and others that point to institutional causes. The cultural explanations highlight a rigid medieval society in which elites aspire to be warriors and find commerce undignified. Institutional explanations focus on the excessive centralization of power in the absolutist monarch and the problems that result from the principal-agent relation between the monarch and those charged with running the enterprise in Asia. In this paper we argue that it is shortsighted to try to ascribe primacy to only one of these determining factors. Following a recent literature that highlights the inter-relatedness of culture and institutions in development we argue that the failure of the Portuguese enterprise in Asia must be understood in the context of the transition of a medieval society into the modern era, where new opportunities made possible by new technologies and circumstances put a strain on prevailing beliefs and institutions. These new opportunities required changes in culture and institutions in order to be fully taken advantage of, in particular the embrace of commerce as opposed to violence as the key organizing principle. We show how the Portuguese enterprise in Asia made some moves towards those changes, yet the transition was slow, imperfect and incomplete, leading to inefficiencies and the squandering of opportunities to capitalize on their monopoly. In contrast, the British and Dutch reached Asia with a culture that was more suited to commerce and institutions (e.g. joint-stock companies) that allowed them to very quickly usurp Portugal’s hegemony in the region.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114987536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Conflict Between Kahn’s 1936 Reply to Neisser, That ‘My Own Ideas Were Largely Derived From Mr. Keynes’, and Kahn’s Critical Assessment of Keynes’s Math Skills in R. Skidelsky (1992)","authors":"M. E. Brady","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3496119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3496119","url":null,"abstract":"The claim made to Robert Skidelsky by Richard Kahn, published in Skidelsky’s 1992 second volume of his autobiography of Keynes, that “…he recalled Keynes himself as being a poor mathematician by 1927…�?, is in direct conflict with Kahn’s 1936 reply to Neisser, that \"My own ideas were largely derived from Mr. Keynes.�? An examination of the mathematical analysis on page 183 of Kahn’s June, 1931, Economic Journal article on the employment multiplier shows that the mathematical style in Kahn’s article is identical to Keynes’s mathematical style of stating the problem and then giving the final result, but in which none of the intermediate steps in the mathematical analysis are provided. Kahn’s answer on page 183 of his article in 1931, which was the result of finding the finite limiting value of a geometrical, declining, infinite series of numbers, is identical to the answer presented by Keynes on page 315 in footnote 1 in chapter 26 of Keynes’s 1921 A Treatise on Probability except for notation. One need only replace Keynes’s q variable with Kahn’s k variable to get the answer provided by Kahn on page 183 of his 1931 article. Nowhere in Kahn’s article is there any explanation or discussion of what he is doing mathematically or technically that allows him to derive the finite limiting value. There are no intermediate steps provided anywhere in the article by Kahn. There is no discussion of the words “geometrical�?, �?infinite series �?, �?declining�?, or “limit�? in the article. All Kahn does is present the initial problem and then present the answer, which is identical to Keynes’s style. Given Keynes’s worked out multiplier analysis, used by Keynes in a speech in May, 1929, the evidence is overwhelming that Keynes showed Kahn, sometime before June, 1931, how his employment multiplier problem was mathematically identical to Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability problem on page 315 in footnote 1 of chapter 26. Given this, then it is clear why Kahn stated in 1936 that \"My own ideas were largely derived from Mr. Keynes.\" Historians of economic thought and economic historians have all overlooked Keynes mathematical analysis of the theoretical and mathematical foundations for the multiplier provided in the A Treatise on Probability. For instance, Paul Samuelson missed a golden opportunity in his 1977 Journal of Economic Literature to show that Keynes had already developed the logical and mathematical technique needed to generate the multiplier, but Samuelson overlooked Keynes’s technical analysis in his work on Keynes’s risk analysis in chapter 26 of the A Treatise on Probability. The real unanswered question is why, after nine decades, no economist has yet recognized that it was Keynes who showed Kahn how to apply the technical tools to derive the multiplier concept and not the other way around.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126389706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Review of: Mancur Olson (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. Yale University Press","authors":"Wazeer Murtala","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3531904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3531904","url":null,"abstract":"While the use of historical methods to explain the rise and fall of states, empires and kingdoms may not be new as evident in various classical works, Olsson’s adoption of economic and social contests among local groups and how they shape the economic outcomes, policies and indeed resource allocations within a country to explain stagflation and slow growth in countries with long standing democracies and stability is innovative.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"2003 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128175873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Political Economy of Transition Reforms","authors":"S. Guriev","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3685846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3685846","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter discusses the political economy of transition from plan to market. We start with the political economy before transition when powerful vested interests delayed necessary reforms thus leading to the bankruptcy of the communist regimes. We then move to the political economy of early transition reforms and explain the divergence in the design and the outcomes of those reforms across the transition region. Next, we explain the rise in inequality and respective anti-reform backlash that was observed in many transition countries. We conclude with the analysis of today’s political economy analysis and implications for future reformers.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125070503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Income Growth and its Distribution from Eisenhower to Obama: The Growing Importance of In-Kind Transfers (1959-2016)","authors":"J. Elwell, Kevin Corinth, R. Burkhauser","doi":"10.3386/w26439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/w26439","url":null,"abstract":"We provide the first survey-based look at levels and trends in income and its distribution from 1959 to 2016 by linking Current Population Survey data from 1967 through 2016 with decennial Census data for 1959. We find that the dramatic decline in the market income of the middle class (measured as the median American tax unit or the mean value of the middle quintile of American tax units) began in 1969. However, we find that this decline was more than offset by government tax and transfer programs – especially in-kind transfers. Conventional measures of median income and income inequality that exclude the market value of in-kind transfers will substantially understate the impact of government policies in offsetting the stagnation of median market income growth and the rise in market income inequality since 1969.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"324 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115870147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Monetary Systems","authors":"Julia M. Puaschunder","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3474806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3474806","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout modern international finance, different monetary regimes existed. International monetary arrangements initially arose from the need to provide international trade with easy means of settling trans-border payments (Semmler, 2019). For centuries, both domestic and international trade was carried out using gold and silver (Semmler, 2019). The Gold standard during the Interwar Period since 1870, the Bretton Woods system and the following Euro currency introduction. This essay summarizing the differences between the three Monetary and currency systems: Gold standard, Bretton Woods and Euro-System and highlights the success and failures of the different approaches to guide monetary matters throughout history.","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117160330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Monastic Account Books and Price History of Seventeenth-Century Russia","authors":"A. Mustafin","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3471874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3471874","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses the records of monastic account books to assess the level of prices in Russia in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The data from these books allow us to construct salt and rye price series, and identify prices of other goods for single years. The resulting numbers demonstrate that the prices remained largely unchanged. The exceptions were the mid-1640s and the early 1660s, when the price fluctuations were driven by the failed financial reforms. The available data shows the prices did not change synchronically in Russia and Europe. Our assumption, therefore, is that Russia stood apart from the price revolution of Western Europe in the seventeenth century","PeriodicalId":176096,"journal":{"name":"Economic History eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124384340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}