Economic History Review最新文献

This paper studies the impact of collectivization on patricide in China during the Cultural Revolution. From 1955 to 1957, nearly 96 per cent of farmers were organized into communes. Consequently, fathers lost control over family wealth. We propose that this shift decreased fathers’ bargaining power over their adult sons, which might increase family conflicts. On the basis of a novel dataset, we find that the speed of collectivization significantly increased patricide, and the result is robust by employing ruggedness to instrumenting for the speed of collectivization. Our study extends the literature on intra-household bargaining from couples to intergenerational relationships.

This paper qualitatively and quantitatively examines the development of the sovereign debt market in Prewar China under different governments. During the Beijing Era (1912–26), accompanied by the establishment of necessary financial institutions, the sovereign debt market emerged to meet fiscal needs. Surprisingly, the Nationalist government, in power from 1927, successfully cultivated a robust market characterized by its expanding size and liquidity. Setting itself apart from its predecessors, the government established credibility as a borrower in two key ways. Firstly, it demonstrated unwavering commitment to debt service by settling previous debts and offering well-structured new ones, even during challenging times. Furthermore, the government escrowed fiscal revenue, pledged for debt repayments, to a semi-independent committee of private bankers on behalf of debtholders, enhancing public confidence. Secondly, the government showcased its ability to secure tax revenues for debt repayments. However, starting from 1931/2, the debt market experienced a decline due to the government's compromised ability to pay resulting from external wars and shifting political priorities that weakened its commitment to debt repayments. Empirical evidence confirms the market's responsiveness to regime shifts and policy changes. This paper sheds light on how a nascent autocratic government can successfully borrow from the public.

The existing studies usually find that technical change was very important in constraining the economic growth of the Soviet Union. While these studies have been successful in quantifying the extent of technical change, they have been less successful in quantifying its nature. This paper moves a step closer to probing the essence of Soviet efficiency by splitting the aggregate technical change into its subcomponents – namely, capital and labour efficiency. I find that the Soviet Union registered strong labour efficiency gains during most of the postwar period, converging towards the labour efficiency level of the global frontier – the US. Labour efficiency growth did decrease over time, but labour efficiency was not a primary cause of Soviet growth retardation. That retardation was instead caused by a decline in capital efficiency. At a disaggregated level, I find that the decrease in capital efficiency was driven by structures. I hypothesize that labour shortages and an inadequate investment policy resulted in a large stock of unfinished, and hence idle, structures, distorting Soviet economic growth.

This article provides a new interpretation of Brazil's independence that relates the process of political emancipation to the Portuguese empire's fiscal crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We discuss the origins and impact of the fiscal crisis that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal in 1807 and the transfer of the government to Rio de Janeiro. Quantitative evidence shows that expenditures with the palace and the army in Brazil were higher than those discussed in the previous literature. Moreover, the government was only able to finance itself by increasing loans via paper money issuances from the Bank of Brazil. Real wages show that the inflationary policy in the 1810s led to a rapid decline in living standards, fuelling dissatisfaction with the government. Our findings are consistent with views expressed in contemporary official correspondence and parliamentary debates.