An eclectic array of quantitative data sketches public and private poor relief in the century before 1880, and invites new interpretations. Church and secular charity was meagre in the eighteenth century, and probably earlier. While richer countries transferred a higher share of national income to the poor than did poorer countries, the trend in this share failed to march upward with income across the nineteenth century. Some explanations are proposed for the differences between countries and the decline in poor relief's share of national income in England-Wales and the Low Countries before 1880. It may be that the newly franchised had stronger reasons to oppose tax-based relief than the elites who had voice at the start of the century. Changes in voice partly explain the movements of English poor relief over time and space. So do movements in the chances that the disenfranchised would exit from cooperating and supplying labour.

A popular explanation for the supposed ‘delayed industrialisation’ of the nineteenth century French economy has been the inappropriate attitudes and actions of the managerial classes and family firms. To address these claims we model the supply and demand for entrepreneurship and also management success. We analyse a data set of 244 nineteenth century French businessmen, showing that on the demand side textiles offered greater, and iron and steel less, than average opportunities. On the supply side, secondary and university education were negatively associated with starting a successful firm, as was a father already in business. Surprisingly, Protestantism made no difference to the chances of setting up a firm. In the business performance model, the longer the period the businessman was active, the greater the accumulation – not consistent with life-cycle models of saving. Second, those who started their own business, compared with entering an existing firm, left less wealth at death than they could have expected to acquire over a normal lifetime, other things being equal. Unlike formal education, training – mainly apprenticeship – was associated with greater wealth at death. The pace of wealth accumulation suggests a dynamic sector during the Second Empire, at least where larger businesses were concerned.

The article analyses the rapid development of the Soviet economy during the first three Five Year Plans. A simulation model is used to determine the importance of three distinctive Soviet institutions/policies – the concentration of investment on heavy industry, the collectivisation of agriculture, and the use of ambitious output targets in conjunction with soft budget constraints to guide business activity. It is shown that the investment strategy and the planning system were responsible for rapid industrialisation, including a significant rise in the standard of living. Collectivisation did increase the rate of growth over the 1930s but by only a small amount.

The article argues that for a region adopting a technology from elsewhere, an existing stock of (relevant) human capital was essential to the rapid and successful adoption of the technology. But once the technology has been fully assimilated, increments to human capital would not be expected to be important in its further growth. Thus, Catalan industrialisation was possible because the level of human capital present in industry was enough to adopt and modify new technologies. Human capital stock was mainly the result of past investments in on-the-job training, and children's informal education took place in the workplace rather than the schoolroom. Therefore, the level of human capital present in the workforce was higher than literacy and schooling rates showed. However, evidence is also presented on the low contribution made by human capital to growth rates.

Although mortality in Britain showed a long term decline from as early as the eighteenth century, it stagnated in the nineteenth century under the pressures of urbanisation and industrialisation. This paper examines the economic factors which lay behind the resumption of the mortality decline in Britain 1870–1914. A framework of analysis is developed which distinguishes factors in the physical environment (like population density) which affected mortality directly, from price and income movements which affected decisions about expenditure on sewers, water supplies, food, medical staff. A regression analysis of mortality in a sample of 36 towns in England and Wales suggests increases in the incomes of households and town council tax revenues were instrumental in the decline of mortality. This allowed extra spending not only on food, as McKeown emphasised, but also on a wide range of health-enhancing goods and services. The major improvement in the physical environment was the housing stock which rose faster than the population whilst its quality and dimensions were increasingly regulated by central and local government.

This article examines private Austrian investment in the Hungarian economy as an example of private financial investment in a backward foreign economy in the late nineteenth century. The main finding is the dominant role of Austrian investment in institutional securities such as Hungarian state bonds and bank securities, which comprised a steadily rising proportion in the portfolios of investors. The only other important sector of the Hungarian economy that was invested in directly was the transport system, which depended on the fluctuations in the development of the Hungarian economy rather than on long-term trends. Securities of the manufacturing sector did not attract the interest of most Austrian investors. Banks and the state thus constituted an element of stability in the Hungarian economy and helped it to acquire funds that could not be provided by the domestic market.

Understanding the pattern of postwar slowdown in Soviet productivity growth requires evaluation of the impact of World War II and associated shocks. Continuous productivity series for industry and the whole economy are estimated for the period 1928–85. The pattern of Soviet productivity growth was highly disturbed; by postwar standards its underlying growth was slow. Rapid growth and slowdown from the late 1940s through the 1960s and beyond are explained just by postwar recovery possibilities and their exhaustion. Clear evidence of an adverse break in the productivity trend does not transpire until the 1970s.

This paper examines the effects of Germany's inter-war reparation agreements in the framework of the Keynesian transfer problem. According to conventional wisdom, with free capital mobility reparation transfers are necessarily under-effected. I argue that while this is true for the Dawes Plan period between 1924 and 1929, the Young Plan for German reparations after 1929 created an external credit constraint such that during the depression, no counteracting capital flows could come forth and reparations were fully (or over-) effected. This is consistent with the so-called Borchardt hypothesis, which claims that stabilisation policy in Germany during the Great Depression was credit constrained and that lack of budgetary discipline during the preceding years was instrumental in creating this constraint. Accounting for the foreign credit restriction created by the Young Plan, Germany's deflationary policies during the slump can be interpreted as the austerity reaction to an imminent foreign debt crisis. The balance of payment stabilisation required by the Young Plan explains most of the decline in German national product during the depression if Keynesian import functions are assumed and suitably parameterised. Simulation of various different transfer profiles suggests that with tighter macroeconomic policies during the Dawes Plan period after 1924, a large part of the income contraction after 1929 could have been avoided. The results imply that both parts of Borchardt's hypothesis hold up even under plainly Keynesian assumptions.

Free banking in Switzerland lasted from 1826 to 1907. Although the system was reasonably successful, the Swiss experience has been almost entirely neglected in the debate over free banking. In its more advanced state of development, the stability of the Swiss free banking system deteriorated, since (1) all assumptions underlying the so-called law of adverse clearings were more or less violated, and (2) the note-issuing banks were prevented by their non-issuing rivals from increasing their discount rates, even if some of them were faced with heavy losses of specie. In 1907, therefore, free banking had to be abandoned.

Evidence from newly constructed monthly indices of manufacturing production shows that differences between the Scandinavian countries regarding business cycles in the interwar years were closely related to monetary policy decisions. In the 1920s Sweden made an early return to gold, while Denmark and Norway experienced large fluctuations in nominal and real exchange rates before restoring the gold standard at the prewar parity in 1927–28. The differences in monetary policy were mirrored in the business cycle history; Denmark and Norway being alone in having a particularly severe contraction period in the years 1925–27, referred to as the gold-parity depression. The nominal depreciation of the effective exchange rates following the abandonment of the gold standard in September 1931 led to a significant real depreciation in all three countries. Econometric evidence confirms the view that the decision to leave gold was instrumental in dampening the contractionary business cycle impulses from abroad during the years of the Great Depression.

The purpose of this article is to present new evidence on living standards during the Spanish industrialisation process by means of secular trends in height. The data pertain to Elche, a town in the Valencia region of southeastern Spain that witnessed early and rapid industrial development in the context of Spain's delayed industrialisation and experienced strong immigration during the twentieth century. Thus, the relationship between biological standards of living and industrialisation and urbanisation is explored. The data suggest that the first stages of industrialisation in the late nineteenth century did not bring much improvement to workers' living conditions. The consequences to health and nutrition of Spain's Civil War and its aftermath are also examined. Finally, we comment on the process of general convergence in height that took place at the end of the period considered.

This paper aims at measuring as precisely as possible the changes in the level of protection in Italy from the 1870s to the 1920s – i.e. during the first phase of the country's industrialisation. It shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, protection was quite low – with the possible exception of a short spell of time in the late 1880s–90s. Therefore the static welfare losses were small, but also the alleged dynamic role of protection in fostering industrialisation seems small as well. In the last section of the paper we speculate on the implications of these findings for other countries. This evidence is not conclusive, but it does cast some doubts on the relevance of protection in 19th century Europe.

This article describes the contribution of foreign funds to the development of Italian electric power companies and the placing of loans in New York in the late 1920s. The effect of foreign loans on the financing structure of nine important Italian electric power companies in a period in which domestic long term funds were lacking is discussed. The transformation into a holding structure followed a path common to electric producers in many countries; at the same time holding companies' securities proved more marketable in the international market and the process of financing was made easier. The eventual macro effects of foreign loans on the domestic money supply and on the level of the Lira exchange rate are examined and some questions are raised concerning the relationship set up between the State, financial intermediaries and private savers during the Fascist regime.