Economic History

In the development literature, some countries are cited more often than others as examples of development success. These countries are understood to have policies and institutions in place that could be transferred, at least in part, to less successful countries both within their own regions, and elsewhere in the world. As such, they may constitute ‘role models of development’. This scholarly volume contains historical accounts of a select set of successful countries in the developing world; successful by virtue of their growth and development path — albeit at times in an uneven, non-linear, and patchy manner. Each unique case describes the fundamental ‘causes’ of success: initial conditions and resources; local, regional, and international factors shaping the national state of affairs; contributions to the development process by internal and external actors and institutions. Each country has a story to tell from where useful lessons can be drawn. While other similar works have presented cases of successful development strategies, they tend to be region-specific or constitute a relatively small number of cases. This book takes a more wide-ranging perspective involving a large number of country studies, spanning world regions and development levels.

Latin America is attracting increasing interest due to the strong economic performance of the last decade and to the political changes that are taking place. This book gives a unique, comprehensive, and up to date view of Latin America economic development over the two centuries since Independence. It considers Latin American economies within the wider context of the international economy, and covers economic growth, international trade, capital flows, and trends in inequality and human development. With chapters that cover different eras, it traces the major developments of Latin American countries and offers a novel and coherent interpretation of the economic history of the region. It combines a wealth of original research, new perspectives, and empirical information to provide a synthesis of the growing literature that both complements and extends previous studies.

This book is a major study of the new market approach to energy policy in Britain since 1979. It describes the miners' strike, the privatizations of the gas, electricity, nuclear generation, and coal industries, and looks at events such as the dash for gas, regulatory failures in setting monopoly prices, and the takeovers and consolidations of the late 1990s. The author sets out the achievements of the new market philosophy, but also analyses why it has ultimately failed to turn energy industries into normal commodity businesses. The revised paperback edition includes a new chapter on the White Paper on a low-carbon economy and updated discussions on nuclear power, to incorporate the 2003 Nuclear White Paper, price reviews, and emissions trading.

This book focuses on the relationship between banks and small firms in a comparative historical perspective. By comparing the rise of small firms in France, Germany, and Italy and their decline Britain, this book analyses how the structure of the countries’ banking systems has affected the growth of small firms. This analysis is placed in the historical context of the political economy of these four countries to show how banking and industrial structures developed over the century as a consequence of the state’s need to mediate between different social and economic groups. This approach shows why British banking became so concentrated and the negative impact this had on the supply of finance to small firms. The experiences of France, Germany, and Italy show alternative structures and policy responses towards small firms.

This book is the first book in a series which aims to provide a guide to the rapidly changing methodological frontiers of the field of economics. The absence of such a guide has left economists ill at ease, and has created a backlash against new methods. The series debates critical issues, allowing proponents of a particular research method to present proposals in a safe yet critical context, with alternatives being clarified. This first volume reflects the challenges that are opened by new research opportunities. The goal of the current volume, and the series it presages, is to open formally a dialog on methodology. The conviction behind the series is that such a debate will rebound to the benefit of social science in general, and economics in particular. The issues under discussion strike to the very heart of the social-scientific enterprise.

This is a book about the discovery of macroeconomic ideas and concepts long before the term macroeconomics had been coined. The cast of authors varies from doctors and physicians (Sir William Petty and François Quesnay), to philosophers (David Hume and Adam Smith), to bankers (Richard Cantillon and Henry Thornton) to Prime Ministers of France (John Law and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot). These authors had very rich and varied careers and the book re-creates specific moments in their careers that influenced both their lives and their writings. Building on these events the contributions of each author are outlined and discussed. Examination of their writings show that by the start of the 19th century they had left a rich legacy of macroeconomics ranging from the analysis and measurement of national income, the depiction of the circular flow of income, the debate on the role of money in the economy, the way to model the economy, the importance of labour, land and capital, the role of entrepreneurship, the Central Bank as a lender of last resort, and much more.

The Glitter of Gold studies the so far unexplored operation of the international monetary system that prevailed before the emergence of the international gold standard in 1873. Conventional wisdom has it that the emergence of gold as a global anchor was both an inescapable and a desirable evolution, given the exchange rate stability it provided and Britain's predominance. The book draws on a wealth of archival and new statistical evidence to demonstrate that global exchange rate stability always prevailed before the making of the gold standard. This was despite the heterogeneity among national monetary regimes based on gold, silver, or both. The reason for the stability before the establishment of the gold standard is France's bimetallic system. France, by being in a position to trade gold for silver, and vice-versa, effectively pegged the exchange rate between gold and silver at its legal ratio of 15.5 :1. This system proved remarkably stable and flexible, thanks to a global network of foreign exchange and precious metal arbitrage, operated from Paris and London by leading international banks - most prominently, the Rothschilds. Contrary to the received wisdom, the controversies of the 1860s on the “double standard” signalled both the advantages of this system and the considerable costs that large countries would have to pay if the world wanted to shift to a single standard. It took a series of political shocks, misguided decisions, and international rivalries to put an end to bimetallism in the early 1870s.

This book presents a history of the global securities market. It is the product of over thirty years of research. It covers many aspects of the history of the securities markets from its beginnings in Medieval Venice through Amsterdam and London to its operations in Tokyo and New York today. It integrates the history of both stocks and bonds, established and emerging markets, stock exchanges and over-the-counter trading, and the crises and continuity that have made the global securities market such a force in the world over the centuries.

The gold standard and the Great Depression might appear to be two very different topics requiring two entirely separate books, and the attempt to combine them here reflects Barry Eichengreen's conviction that the gold standard is the key to understanding the Depression. The gold standard of the 1920s set the stage for the Depression of the 1930s by heightening the fragility of the international financial system, and was the mechanism that transmitted the destabilizing impulse from the USA to the rest of the world and magnified that initial destabilizing shock; it was the principal obstacle to offsetting action, and the binding constraint preventing policymakers from averting the failure of banks and containing the spread of financial panic. For all these reasons, the international gold standard was a central factor in the worldwide Depression; recovery proved possible, for these same reasons, only after abandoning the gold standard. The gold standard also existed in the nineteenth century, of course, without exercising such debilitating effects – the explanation for the contrast lies in the disintegration during and after World War I of the political and economic foundations of the prewar gold standard system. The dual bases for the prewar system were the credibility of the official commitment to gold and international cooperation: the credibility induced financial capital to flow in stabilizing directions, buttressing economic stability; the cooperation signaled that support for the gold standard in times of crisis transcended the resources any one country could bring to bear. Both were eroded by the economic and political consequences of the Great War, and the decline in credibility rendered cooperation all the more vital – when it was not forthcoming, economic crisis was inevitable. The decline in both credibility and cooperation during and after World War I reflected a complex confluence of domestic and international political changes, and economic and intellectual changes. This book attempts to fit all these elements together into a coherent portrait of economic policy and performance between the wars. The goal is to show how the policies pursued, in conjunction with economic imbalances created by World War I, gave rise to the catastrophe that was the Great Depression. The argument is that the gold standard fundamentally constrained economic policies, and that it was largely responsible for creating the unstable economic environment on which the policies acted.