The sixty or more years since the end of the Second World War have seen an unprecedented increase... more The sixty or more years since the end of the Second World War have seen an unprecedented increase in the average European’s material standard of living. Europeans are now enjoying incomes that are, on average and in real terms, about three to five times as high as in 1950; those born now can expect to live about ten years longer than the generation born in the early 1950s, and access to secondary and tertiary education is far wider than it was sixty years ago. The now widely-used Human Development Index (HDI) seeks to capture changes in the quality of life as a weighted composite measure of per capita income (GDP), longevity, and years of formal education cum literacy. A bounded, relative index of development, the HDI is useful as a convenient means to document some of the comparative quantitative dimensions of welfare change in Europe. Below we report HDI scores for nineteen European countries. Leaving aside, for the moment, changes in country rankings, regional variations and the behavior of the underlying series, the big message is clear: in HDI terms just as much as in terms of per capita GDP, Europeans are now much better off than they were in 1950, and variance in HDI across European countries is now only half the level it was then. However, the HDI is certainly a less than perfect measure of broadly conceived living standards. It ignores the extent to which human rights, civil liberty, and political freedom are protected. It makes no allowance for how income and wealth are distributed among members of society or for the extent of unemployment. It incorporates longevity, but not the health status of the population. Most tellingly, perhaps, it does not tell us about what could be reasoned to be a fair expression of human well being – happiness. Richard Layard’s recent work (2003) has shown that the happiness of the population in the western world has not increased, despite rapid growth in material living standards. The changes in living standards across Europe since the end of the Second World War have been shaped by changes in incomes, demographics, and the institutional settings of “welfare delivery.” The chapter starts by sketching out the Europe-wide rise of the public sector. The second section offers a comparative quantitative examination of changes in key welfare measures and the relationships between them. The final section explores the causes and economic consequences of demographic change.
This thesis examines the economic development of industrial engineering in Austria-Hungary betwee... more This thesis examines the economic development of industrial engineering in Austria-Hungary between 1870 and 1913. The pattern of sectoral change in Austria's machine-building industry is investigated in Chapter Two. New output estimates indicate that mechanical engineering took a course quite different from that suggested in recent historiography. Austria's capital goods sector was subject to prolonged stagnation during the "Great Depression" of the 1870s and 1880s. But during the subsequent two decades mechanical engineering made a large and rising contribution to overall industrial growth. Chapter Three is concerned with the rise of industrial machine-building in Hungary. Based on new output estimates, the chapter traces the phases and origins of a process which accounted for a markedly faster expansion of mechanical engineering than in the Western half of the Habsburg Empire. Chapter Four provides an analysis of the financial and investment behaviour of major ma...
This paper examines the emergence and dynamics of border effects over time. We exploit the unique... more This paper examines the emergence and dynamics of border effects over time. We exploit the unique historical setting of the multi-national Habsburg Empire prior to the Great War to explore the hypothesis that border effects emerged as a result of persistent trade effects of ethno-linguistic networks within an overall integrating economy. While markets tended to integrate, the process was strongly asymmetric and shaped by a simultaneous rise in national consciousness and organisation among Austria-Hungary’s different ‘nationalities’. We find that the political borders which separated the empire’s successor states after the First World War became visible in the price dynamics of grain markets already 25-30 years before the First World War. This effect of a ‘border before a border ’ cannot be explained by factors such as physical geography, changes in infrastructure or patterns of asymmetric integration with neighbouring regions outside of the Habsburg customs and monetary union. Howev...
This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where gr... more This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where growing conflict between various ethnic and national groups within an empire might have contributed to the emergence of internal borders and even its eventual dissolution. To this end we adopt an Engel-and-Rogers–type approach to examine on an annual basis the extent of co-movements in grain prices across a sample of ten regional capital cities in the empire and over the period 1877-1910. There are two key findings. First, the political borders that emerged from 1918 onwards became visible in the price dynamics of grain markets already 20 years before the Great War. Second, this effect of a “border before a border ” can be explained by the extent of language heterogeneity across the various parts of the Habsburg Empire. These results raise several important questions about both the forces that shaped pre-war market integration as well as the economic costs of breaking up the Habsburg custo...
The sixty or more years since the end of the Second World War have seen an unprecedented increase... more The sixty or more years since the end of the Second World War have seen an unprecedented increase in the average European’s material standard of living. Europeans are now enjoying incomes that are, on average and in real terms, about three to five times as high as in 1950; those born now can expect to live about ten years longer than the generation born in the early 1950s, and access to secondary and tertiary education is far wider than it was sixty years ago. The now widely-used Human Development Index (HDI) seeks to capture changes in the quality of life as a weighted composite measure of per capita income (GDP), longevity, and years of formal education cum literacy. A bounded, relative index of development, the HDI is useful as a convenient means to document some of the comparative quantitative dimensions of welfare change in Europe. Below we report HDI scores for nineteen European countries. Leaving aside, for the moment, changes in country rankings, regional variations and the behavior of the underlying series, the big message is clear: in HDI terms just as much as in terms of per capita GDP, Europeans are now much better off than they were in 1950, and variance in HDI across European countries is now only half the level it was then. However, the HDI is certainly a less than perfect measure of broadly conceived living standards. It ignores the extent to which human rights, civil liberty, and political freedom are protected. It makes no allowance for how income and wealth are distributed among members of society or for the extent of unemployment. It incorporates longevity, but not the health status of the population. Most tellingly, perhaps, it does not tell us about what could be reasoned to be a fair expression of human well being – happiness. Richard Layard’s recent work (2003) has shown that the happiness of the population in the western world has not increased, despite rapid growth in material living standards. The changes in living standards across Europe since the end of the Second World War have been shaped by changes in incomes, demographics, and the institutional settings of “welfare delivery.” The chapter starts by sketching out the Europe-wide rise of the public sector. The second section offers a comparative quantitative examination of changes in key welfare measures and the relationships between them. The final section explores the causes and economic consequences of demographic change.
This thesis examines the economic development of industrial engineering in Austria-Hungary betwee... more This thesis examines the economic development of industrial engineering in Austria-Hungary between 1870 and 1913. The pattern of sectoral change in Austria's machine-building industry is investigated in Chapter Two. New output estimates indicate that mechanical engineering took a course quite different from that suggested in recent historiography. Austria's capital goods sector was subject to prolonged stagnation during the "Great Depression" of the 1870s and 1880s. But during the subsequent two decades mechanical engineering made a large and rising contribution to overall industrial growth. Chapter Three is concerned with the rise of industrial machine-building in Hungary. Based on new output estimates, the chapter traces the phases and origins of a process which accounted for a markedly faster expansion of mechanical engineering than in the Western half of the Habsburg Empire. Chapter Four provides an analysis of the financial and investment behaviour of major ma...
This paper examines the emergence and dynamics of border effects over time. We exploit the unique... more This paper examines the emergence and dynamics of border effects over time. We exploit the unique historical setting of the multi-national Habsburg Empire prior to the Great War to explore the hypothesis that border effects emerged as a result of persistent trade effects of ethno-linguistic networks within an overall integrating economy. While markets tended to integrate, the process was strongly asymmetric and shaped by a simultaneous rise in national consciousness and organisation among Austria-Hungary’s different ‘nationalities’. We find that the political borders which separated the empire’s successor states after the First World War became visible in the price dynamics of grain markets already 25-30 years before the First World War. This effect of a ‘border before a border ’ cannot be explained by factors such as physical geography, changes in infrastructure or patterns of asymmetric integration with neighbouring regions outside of the Habsburg customs and monetary union. Howev...
This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where gr... more This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where growing conflict between various ethnic and national groups within an empire might have contributed to the emergence of internal borders and even its eventual dissolution. To this end we adopt an Engel-and-Rogers–type approach to examine on an annual basis the extent of co-movements in grain prices across a sample of ten regional capital cities in the empire and over the period 1877-1910. There are two key findings. First, the political borders that emerged from 1918 onwards became visible in the price dynamics of grain markets already 20 years before the Great War. Second, this effect of a “border before a border ” can be explained by the extent of language heterogeneity across the various parts of the Habsburg Empire. These results raise several important questions about both the forces that shaped pre-war market integration as well as the economic costs of breaking up the Habsburg custo...
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