This paper explores a number of the unresolved issues posed by the debate on the social saving of railroads. The final section includes a brief summary of the main findings of the new economic history of transportation.

In the late nineteenth century, when most of the world was on a gold standard, India was on a silver standard. Silver was used for coins, held in hoards, and worn as jewelry. Regression analysis confirms a positive relationship between prices and the money supply, and inverse relationships between prices and rainfall and prices and the combined influences of railroads and commercialization. The. influx of silver was not correlated with the money supply, apparently because hoarding and dishoarding by peasants and others caused the amount of money in active circulation to vary.

Differences in regional prices and wages are examined for the United States in 1890, together with the relationship between the cost of living and city size, and the determinants of regional industrial growth. Results indicate that regional cost-of-liying differences were sufficiently large so that money wages cannot be used for purposes of comparing the economic well-being of wage earners across regions. Except for the South, money wages and the cost of living were positively correlated. The relative differences in money wages, however, were greater; consequently real wages in high wage-price areas were generally higher.

The South's failure to industrialize more rapidly in the antebellum period did not lead to its immiserization. The South's terms of trade improved over the antebellum period so that its consumption potential expanded more rapidly than did production. Specialization in cotton production promoted a favorable movement of relative prices facing Southern producers. A customs union analysis shows that the South might have industrialized to a greater extent and might have raised its consumption potential further had it been able to impose an independent tariff on imports from all areas, including the rest of the United States.

In several recently published works Richard A. Easterlin has shown that per capita incomes as measured in current dollars have tended to converge over time. In this paper the per capita income estimates have been adjusted for interregional differences in prices. In adjusting the regional per capita income estimates for interregional differences in both urban and rural-urban prices it was found that no significant differences occurred in either the levels of differences or in the rates of convergence from the original estimates. In addition, no significant correlation was found between interregional per capita incomes and price levels.

This paper will test three models of underdevelopment against the experience of Thailand from 1850 to 1940, when Thailand became a major rice exporter. The models are a dependency model, a staples model, and a supply and demand model of technical and institutional change. The technical and institutional change model provides the best explanation. Divergences between the goals of national security and economic development as well as those between the private interests of the elite decision makers and the social interest explain Thai underinvestment in increasing agricultural productivity and account in large part for the persistence of underdevelopment.

In campaigning for the establishment of the National Forests in the late nineteenth century, conservationists pointed to fraud and timber theft in the Pacific Northwest. In this paper we argue that the conservationists were misdirected; that it was a costly Federal land policy that encouraged fraud and theft. In the face of restrictive land laws, fraud was necessary if lumber companies were to acquire large tracts of land to take advantage of economies of scale in logging. Since fraud used real resources, it raised the actual cost of acquiring land and thus delayed the establishment of property rights. Such delays led to theft. The paper examines the public land laws, explains their selection by claimants, and calculates the added transaction costs or rent dissipation that resulted from circumventing the law.

“Government control of cutting on all timberland, private as well as public, is still today, as it was then, the one most indispensable step toward assuring a supply of forest products for the future in the United States.”

This article asks: why were crop failures (dearths) so frequent in western India between 1870 and 1920, and why did dearth decreasingly result in famine, that is, in severe elevation of mortality and in major disruptions of the agricultural sector. It is concluded that deficient rainfall caused the crop failures and that after 1900 increasedtrade in agricultural products and increased demand for labor, coupled with increased credit and relief services from government, significantly reduced the probability that a crop failure could result in widespread famine.

In this paper we stratify a sample of 24 countries by the role of agriculture in industrial growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and focus on systematic differences in the nature and strength of the interactions of institutional with agricultural and industrial change. A novel technique, disjoint principal components models, is applied to categorized data representing 35 facets of social, economic, and political structure and institutions. The results stress the systematic variations in the impact of land institutions among countries with different levels and structures of development. They also underline the critical role of social and political forces in differentiating among paths of economic change. Finally, they highlight the need for cross-section studies using institutional data to understand better the complexity of institutional constraints and influences which often vary little in a given national environment.

The transfer of technology to China in the nineteenth century was carried out both by Chinese and foreigners. Given the half-hearted interest of the Chinese government in such activities, however, the role of direct foreign investment was enhanced. The profitability of such investments was determined not only by comparative costs and other conventional economic variables, but also by the interaction of each project with China's traditional system of political economy. The nature and importance of this interaction is examined by means of a number of case studies. The results emphasize the importance of cultural elements in the transfer of technology.

This essay explores the state of economic knowledge regarding the development of household economic life in the United States since early industrialization by examining explanations for the low labor-force participation of middle-class married women prevailing until the 1940s. These explanations, including those emerging from fertility studies and resting on market forces, imprecisely specify the domestic roles of housewives. Interdisciplinary specification of these roles, drawing on social and cultural historians, and rigorous measurement of time allocation within the household would help resolve the various interpretations and assist in estimating the contribution of household work to social product.

Analyses of the cultural factors supporting modernization and development have moved along a continuum from the clear-cut formulations of Parsons, Schumpeter, and Weber to the paradoxical assertions of contemporary scholars. The failure of countries like Argentina to achieve sustained development after spectacular starts has contributed to the confusion. This study examines two popular cultural explanations for such developmental problems, and finds them both wanting. Men-doza's experience suggests the need to adjust development programs to local cultural exigencies, rather than the reverse, as most analysts have argued. A four-part sequence to this effect is presented.

Around 1850 Sweden had a stock of human capital wildly disproportionate to its very low income level. This situation contributed significantly to the speed of the growth spurt that occurred between that time and World War I. In the short run, this large human capital stock allowed Sweden to take fuller advantage of the new opportunities for exports which appeared around 1860. In the longer run Sweden benefited because it is easier to achieve a rapid accumulation of physical than of human capital. The disproportionate early accumulation of human capital is explained in terms of religious, political, and military events of the previous three centuries.

During the past few years new measures of growth have begun to emerge for the colonial period in American history which allow us to understand more fully the pace and pattern of long-run economic growth. This essay summarizes what we know about colonial growth and discusses rates of growth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After summarizing previous work on the subject, the paper estimates eighteenth-century agricultural productivity in one New England county. Data on total wealth, livestock, crops, land, and agricultural capital are generated from estate inventories. A consumer price index for the period also is constructed. From these data it appears that the seventeenth century experienced growth comparable to modern times, whereas the eighteenth century was a bleak period in our history. Although real wealth per inventory grew at a rate of 0.5 percent per year during the eighteenth century, agricultural productivity declined at a rate of 0.8 percent.

This article examines the establishment in the 1830s of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company and the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company. Utilizing manuscript letters, company records, and government reports, the author contends that conservative financiers, exemplified by Isaac and Arthur Bronson of New York City, structured both firms in an effort to reform the speculative practices of commercial banks and to move capital into the agricultural sector, particularly in the West. The trust company's development also marked an important step in the financiers search for more efficient methods of capital mobilization and formation.

The Chesapeake economy failed to grow during the first half of the eighteenth century, but experienced rapid development during the third quarter of the century. Economic stagnation before 1750 resulted from the inability of tobacco planters either to increase productivity or to reduce costs of production, whereas an increase in grain exports and rising amounts of Scottish credit to planters explain growth during the pre-Revolutionary decades. Nonetheless, whites were able to purchase increasing quantities of consumer goods by exploiting the labor of the increasing numbers of black slaves who produced most of the region's tobacco.

This article reviews recent literature on American growth before 1840 and compares it with estimates derived from the Philadelphia region. The estimates indicate that national output per capita rose no less than 0.S to 1.0 percent per annum in the period 1810-1840 and that growth exhibited trend acceleration. Relatively modest growth was accompanied by extensive development, initiated by sharply lowered transport costs. Faced with higher returns for exports and diminished costs for imports, regional producers increasingly specialized. Heightened intraregional trade fostered a pervasive reallocation of resources among sectors and among subsections of the region. This development helped ensure rapid, post-1840 growth.