Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: The New Comparative Economic History contains 15 essays in honour of Jeffrey Williamson devoted to various topics of interest to economic historians.Although each essay contains original research in its field, they also serve as handy summaries of recent advances in economic history, which allow those readers (like myself) who are a bit behind in the various sub-disciplines of economic history to catch up to the frontier.Allen presents evidence that Indian living standards were comparable to European standards in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although by 1800 English living standards had opened up a lead on Indian standards.One problem in this is the extremely low assigned weight for housing in the consumption basket, only 5 per cent of food expenses, which presumably helps to explain why Allen's series for London real wages were dramatically higher than Oxford real wages for the period.Clark's article somewhat tediously deconstructs British economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between factor inputs and technological progress and argues that Britain rose to prominence because of its large increase in population.Özmucur and Pamuk take a new look at commodity price integration in Europe from 1500 to 1800, expanding the goods examined from just wheat to include olive oil, rice, honey, sugar, soap, meat, and butter.Their use of 25-year moving averages for prices is somewhat suspect, since it obscures problems with missing data and possible short-term price movements.Federico and Gunnar Persson examine the North Atlantic wheat market and emphasise the importance to measures of market integration of adjusting for quality and also changes in domestic integration.Olmstead and Rhode continue the study of grains with an article that charts the changing location of world grain production and the biological advances necessary to adapt to local conditions.An amusing anecdote for local readers is the claim that William Farrer's likeness (still) adorns the two-dollar bill.Grossman's piece on the evolution of commercial bank's capital-to-asset ratios is the only article dealing with financial issues in the book.He finds that capitalto-asset ratios declined throughout the world in the nineteenth century before stabilising in the first half of the twentieth century.In addition, he finds little effect of government regulations.Collins' article on US North-South wage and education differences is one of the better articles in the book that nicely documents the reasons for the catch-up of the South to the rest of the United States in the twentieth century.
Author: Lyndon Moore
Institution: Université de Montréal
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2022771348