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We consider the relative contributions of changing technology and institutions for economic growth through the investigation of a natural experiment in history: the almost simultaneous introduction of the automatic cream separator and the cooperative ownership form in the Danish dairy industry...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008693783
The usual story of the “first era of globalization” at the end of the nineteenth century sees Denmark as something as an outlier: a country which, like Britain, resisted the globalization backlash in the wake of the inflow of cheap grain from the New World, but where agriculture, rather than...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008493491
It is often assumed that Britain’s colonies followed the British doctrine of free trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. Malta, which became a British colony in 1814, did indeed become an early free trader. However, she failed to liberalize the grain trade, even when the mother...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008493492
We analyze Malthus' (1798) model when labor demand shifts persistently. The Malthusian ideas are formalized and derived in terms of stationarity and cointegration, and the implied restrictions are tested against English pre-industrial data 1560-1760. The evidence suggests a negligible marginal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005064788
We examine the case of an important outsider to the Cobden-Chevalier network of bilateral treaties in the second half of the nineteenth century. We attempt to explain this through a study of the structure of Danish trade and protection. We demonstrate, in contrast to previous accounts that have...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005049579
The Malthusian “preventive check” mechanism has been well documented for pre-industrial England through evidence for a negative correlation between the marriage rate and the price of wheat. Other literature, however, speculates that the correlation was in fact positive from the early...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005543483
By documenting the legislative history of the Corn Laws from 1670 and using previously unused data to calculate annual Ad Valorem Equivalents for most years from 1814, it is possible to establish several important facts about British wheat protection. Statutory protection was only significant...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005749688
This paper argues that imperfectly informed consumers use simple signals to identify the characteristics of wine. The geographical denomination and vintage of a wine as well as the characteristics of a particular wine will be considered here. However, the specific characteristics of a wine are...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005749691
It has become popular to argue (e.g. Clark 2007) that all societies were Malthusian until about 1800. At the same time, the phenomenon of surplus labour is well-documented for historical (as well as modern) pre-industrial societies. This study discusses the paradox of surplus labour in a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005749768
We consider the successful early emergence of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the late nineteenth century within the framework of the ‘new institutional economics’ presented by Williamson (2000). Previous work has focused on the social cohesion of the Danes, but we demonstrate that this...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008919630