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Scholars of the ‘resource curse’ increasingly agree that strong institutions can help countries avoid the pitfalls associated with abundant natural resource wealth. This paper argues that certain political coalitions can serve a similar function in the context of weak institutions. To explicate this argument, this paper examines how international commodity booms regularly create credit demand that surpasses available supply, often impelling exporters to seek government assistance with obtaining credit. Four case studies illustrate how coalitional politics dictated governmental responses to such demands. Where exporters were members of the ruling coalition (Chile and Argentina), their needs sparked credit sector reform and government help to access credit. Where exporters were excluded from political power (Colombia and Nigeria), government policy hindered their economic goals. These findings suggest that the resource curse may pivot on coalitional politics in important respects. The paper concludes by assessing this possibility with respect to strategies that are commonly proposed to help developing countries manage their natural resource wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on developments in human society and the global economy since 1932. It is suggested that the most significant changes in this period came about not through new inventions but through the scaling up of existing technologies and processes. Topics discussed include population growth, energy use, nutrition, and social change.

The paper measures productivity growth in seventeen countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. GDP per worker and capital per worker in 1985 US dollars were estimated for 1820, 1850, 1880, 1913, and 1939 by using historical national accounts to back cast Penn World Table data for 1965 and 1990. Frontier and econometric production functions are used to measure neutral technical change and local technical change. The latter includes con-current increases in capital per worker and output per worker beyond the highest values achieved. These increases were pioneered by the rich countries of the day. An increase in the capital-labor ratio was usually followed by a half century in which rich countries raised output per worker at that higher ratio. Then the rich countries moved on to a higher capital-ratio, and technical progress ceased at the lower ratio they abandoned. Most of the benefits of technical progress accrued to the rich countries that pioneered it. It is remarkable that countries in 1990 with low capital labor ratios achieved an output per worker that was no higher than countries with the same capital labor ratio in 1820. In the course of the last two hundred years, the rich countries created the production function of the world that defines the growth possibilities of poor countries today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes relative wheat price, fluctuations to investigate market integration among 72 European and US cities. Applying a Dynamic Factor Model, which has seldom been used in market integration analysis, prices are decomposed into international, national and local components. Thus, national and international market integration are identified by a statistical restriction, and results for each single market are obtained. The first result is that globalization has accelerated faster in the first than in the second half of the 19th century, putting the post-1850 transport revolution into perspective. The USA integrated only later into the European market, discounting the role of the "grain invasion" for trade history. I also show that the European nations that turned protectionist after 1880 reduced the impact of foreign shocks, while free traders fully integrated into the international economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World economic crises express the tensions of a system of accumulation impossible to resolve through the normal functioning of the system. The crash of 1929 was followed by a depression definitively overcome through the enormous cost of the Second World War. Following the post-war expansion, the crisis of the 1970s registered an inflection point. From then on successive crises were repeated periodically for the next four decades, with short lapses of recovery, until the outbreak of 2007. This paper reviews the present crisis in the light of those 40 years, analyzing the relevant cycles and structural conditioning, the changes in economic thinking and interests at play, the regularities and divergences of the crises since 1929, the main forces in conflict and the future trends now being fueled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the twentieth century, private grain exchanges settled the daily prices for North American wheat. By the end of the Second World War, the Canadian and US governments had intervened significantly in these markets. The Canadian government required farmers in its western provinces to deliver their product to the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), a single-selling-desk agency that, by then, had supplanted private wheat marketing in western Canada. Meanwhile, the United States government subsidized farm incomes with domestic-use taxes and import tariffs, but otherwise preserved private wheat marketing. In this article, I demonstrate that these disparate agricultural policies were broadly defined by immutable economic realities imposed on each country by global wheat-trade patterns and triggered by unprecedentedly severe agricultural crises. That is, amidst the precipitous fall in wheat prices in the early 1930s, each government crafted farm-support policies that reflected its domestic-consumption share of wheat production and the importance of wheat to its overall economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often suggested that the earliest theorists of neo-liberalism first entered public controversy in the 1930s and 1940s to dispel the illusion that the welfare state represented a stable middle way between capitalism and socialism. This article argues that this is an anachronistic account of the origins of neoliberalism, since the earliest exponents of neo-liberal doctrine focused on socialist central planning rather than the welfare state as their chief adversary and even sought to accommodate certain elements of the welfare state agenda within their market liberalism. In their early work, neo-liberal theorists were suspicious of nineteenth- century liberalism and capitalism ; emphasized the value commitments that they shared with progressive liberals and socialists ; and endorsed significant state regulation and redistribution as essential to the maintenance of a free society. Neo-liberals of the 1930s and 1940s therefore believed that the legitimation of the market, and the individual liberty best secured by the market, had to be accomplished via an expansion of state capacity and a clear admission that earlier market liberals had been wrong to advocate laissez-faire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the evolution of different forms of business enterprise in the economic history of Italy. In the 150 years since its unification, Italy has experienced a successful mix of business typologies with different contribution to the economic development of the country. In this article, the contribution of big business - privately, foreign owned and State controlled - is reviewed, as well as the long-standing presence of small firms and industrial districts. The most recent evolution in this framework, which has been a distinctive feature of Italian capitalism for over a century, has been the emergence of aggressive, medium-size, internationally oriented specialized firms. Strengths and weaknesses of this varied industrial demography are discussed in the light of the different technological waves that have been characteristic Italy's presence among the most advanced economies in the World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the advances made in chemistry research and instrumentation during World War II and the post-war era. David Brock of the Chemical Heritage Foundation comments on the market for technology such as gas and liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Davis Baird of the University of South Carolina mentions business conditions that led to development of new companies in the mid-1930s. Companies that developed infrared (IR) spectrometers, which were used in an American synthetic rubber program, include National Technical Laboratories which is referred to Beckman Instruments. The use of IR spectroscopy in the wartime penicillin program and the role NMR instruments in examining nuclear moments after the war are mentioned. INSETS: R. Robert Brattain;Other NTL wartime efforts.

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