The conventional view asserts that sharply falling transport costs practically closed the transatlantic price gap for grain by the end of the nineteenth century. This article challenges that view on the basis of an analysis of a new data set of weekly wheat prices and freight costs from New York to UK markets. Although transport costs fell, the fall was neither sharp nor dramatic. The extent of the decline in real terms is very sensitive to the choice of deflator. It is argued that if you are assessing the trade-inhibiting effect of transport costs, the ‘freight factor’ approach, using the price of the transported good as deflator, is the appropriate one. Port charges, insurance and marketing costs also fell by the same modest rate and since these costs were almost as large as transport costs, the price gap remained substantial. One implication is that we need to look elsewhere for the causes of the dramatic increase in New World grain exports.

International migration is determined by both economic and political forces. This article examines the influence of economic, demographic and policy variables on British emigration to four principal destinations in two different eras. Before 1914 the economic and demographic forces that drove British emigration can be clearly identified. Had the same conditions applied in the post-Second World War period, mass emigration from Britain would have continued until the early 1990s. But from the mid-1960s these influences became less powerful as they were increasingly inhibited by immigration policies in the principal destination countries. The long-term decline in emigration is largely accounted for by shifts in policy, especially those that curtailed or abolished the preferences previously extended to settlers from the UK.

The Great Depression in Germany led to the radicalisation of the electorate, leading the country and then the world into the darkest days of Western civilization. Could it have been otherwise? This article explores whether the NSDAP takeover might have been averted with a fiscal policy that lowered the unemployment rate in those parts of Germany where their support rose most rapidly. A counterfactual simulation model based on estimates of the relationship between unemployment and the radical vote at the electoral district level provides a framework for considering how much lower unemployment would have to have been in those districts to prevent the NSDAP from becoming a formidable political force in Germany. Budget neutrality is maintained, so that the simulations do not depend on an expanded fiscal policy. The results indicate that such a policy could well have averted the NSDAP's seizure of power, and the catastrophe that followed in its wake.

The only thing we owe history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde

Stagnant levels of output and incomplete recoveries in the interwar business cycle have received fresh attention in recent work. Building on the work of Borchardt (1991 [1979]), Fisher and Hornstein (2001) calibrate an augmented RBC model of Germany's interwar economy. They find that sluggish productivity combined with high wage costs explain the depth of Germany's interwar depression. In the very different context of a dynamic Phillips curve, Dimsdale, et al. (2004) arrive at the same conclusion. Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2002) find that output in Great Britain and the United States failed to recover to historical trends after the Great Depression. Beaudry and Portier (2002) find that the labour policies of the Popular Front government contributed to stagnant output levels in France during the 1930s. A common perspective shared by these papers is that productivity growth was already low during the 1920s and failed to recover to trend before World War II.

8–10 APRIL 2005, UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER