Manufacturing Productivity Growth in American Economic History

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Field
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Productivity Growth ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Manufacturing Sector ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Manufacturing Productivity ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

This chapter provides an overview of labor and total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector in the United States from colonial times to the present. An introductory section defines concept and terms. This is followed by an historical survey of improvement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sections on the manufacturing revolution of the 1920s and the sector’s contribution during the Great Depression. The remainder of the chapter provides a quantitative perspective on manufacturing productivity growth and its contribution to the overall economy from the end of World War I through the first decade of the twenty-first century.

War and the Next Lesson

Money ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Monetary Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Great Depression

This chapter examines the lessons of World War II with respect to money and monetary policy. World War I exposed the fragility of the monetary structure that had gold as its foundation, the great boom of the 1920s showed how futile monetary policy was as an instrument of restraint, and the Great Depression highlighted the ineffectuality of monetary policy for rescuing the country from a slump—for breaking out of the underemployment equilibrium once this had been fully and firmly established. On the part of John Maynard Keynes, the lesson was that only fiscal policy ensured not just that money was available to be borrowed but that it would be borrowed and would be spent. The chapter considers the experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States with a lesson of World War II: that general measures for restraining demand do not prevent inflation in an economy that is operating at or near capacity.

SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND TAX REGIMES IN THE UNITED STATES, 1763 TO THE PRESENT

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Elliot Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
World War ◽  
Ability To Pay ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Tax Regimes ◽  
The Republic

The essay explores how ideas about social justice and economic performance shaped the debates over federal taxation in the United States since the origins of the republic. The debates were most intense during major national emergencies (the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II), and each debate produced a new tax regime-a tax system with its own characteristic tax base, rate structure, administration apparatus, and social purpose. The criterion of "ability to pay" and a concern for economic efficiency powerfully shaped the formation of every tax regime, but "ability to pay" became the more influential of the two considerations during the national crises of the twentieth century.

Financing Industrial Expansion for War: The Origin of the Defense Plant Corporation Leases

1949 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald T. White
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Industrial Facilities ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
War Finance ◽  
The Government ◽  
Under Construction ◽  
New Facilities

One of the recent tendencies in the United States has been the movement away from private methods of finance to finance through government agencies, a trend that has been particularly noticeable during periods of national catastrophe such as wars and depressions. In these periods we have seen, in addition to other sources of government financing, the use of the War Finance Corporation during World War I and the use on a far larger scale of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Great Depression and World War II.During World War II two thirds of a total expenditure for industrial facilities of approximately $25 billion was directly financed by the government. In contrast, during the three-year period of 1917–1919, only about one tenth of the $6 billion in new facilities under construction was directly financed by the government.

Dark Matter Credit

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip T. Hoffman ◽  
Gilles Postel-Vinay ◽  
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War I ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Credit Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
World War ◽  
Mortgage Debt ◽  
Private Network

Prevailing wisdom dictates that without banks countries would be mired in poverty. Yet somehow much of Europe managed to grow rich long before the diffusion of banks. This book draws on centuries of loan data from France to reveal how credit abounded well before banks opened their doors. The book shows how a vast system of shadow credit enabled nearly a third of French families to borrow in 1740, and by 1840 funded as much mortgage debt as the American banking system of the 1950s. The book traces how this extensive private network outcompeted banks and thrived prior to World War I—not just in France but in Britain, Germany, and the United States—until killed off by government intervention after 1918. Overturning common assumptions about banks and economic growth, the book paints a revealing picture of an until-now hidden market of thousands of peer-to-peer loans made possible by a network of brokers who matched lenders with borrowers and certified the borrowers' creditworthiness. The book challenges widespread misperceptions about French economic history, such as the notion that banks proliferated slowly, and the idea that financial innovation was hobbled by French law. By documenting how intermediaries in the shadow credit market devised effective financial instruments, this compelling book provides new insights into how countries can develop and thrive today.

scholarly journals Organizational Capabilities and the Economic History of the Industrial Enterprise

1992 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred D Chandler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Economic History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organizational Capabilities ◽  
World War ◽  
Industrial Firms ◽  
Industrial Enterprises ◽  
Empirical Regularities ◽  
History Of

In my book Scale and Scope (1990), I focused on the history of the modern industrial firm from the 1880s, when such firms first appeared, through World War II. I did so by comparing the fortunes of more than 600 enterprises—the 200 largest industrial firms at three points in time (World War I, 1929, and World War II) in each of the three major industrial economies (those of the United States, Britain, and Germany). In this paper, I first describe the similarities in the historical beginnings and continuing evolution of these enterprises and then outline my explanation for these similarities. Next, I relate my explanation of these “empirical regularities” to four major economic theories relating to the firm: the neoclassical, the principal-agent, the transaction cost, and the evolutionary. Finally, I suggest the value of the transactions cost and evolutionary theories to historians and economists who are attempting to explain the beginnings and growth of modern industrial enterprises.

The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism

1967 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Lowi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Part ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Public Sphere

Until astonishingly recent times American national government played a marginal role in the life of the nation. Even as late as the eve of World War I, the State Department could support itself on consular fees. In most years revenues from tariffs supplied adequate financing, plus a surplus, from all other responsibilities. In 1800, there was less than one-half a federal bureaucrat per 1,000 citizens. On the eve of the Civil War there were only 1.5 federal bureaucrats per 1,000 citizens, and by 1900 that ratio had climbed to 2.7. This compares with 7 per 1,000 in 1940 and 13 per 1,000 in 1962—exclusive of military personnel.The relatively small size of the public sphere was maintained in great part by the constitutional wall of separation between government and private life. The wall was occasionally scaled in both directions, but concern for the proper relation of private life and public order was always a serious and effective issue. Americans always talked pragmatism, in government as in all other things; but doctrine always deeply penetrated public dialogue. Power, even in the United States, needed justification.Throughout the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, almost every debate over a public policy became involved in the larger debate over the nature and consequences of larger and smaller spheres of government. This period was just as much a “constitutional period” as that of 1789–1820. Each period is distinguished by its effort to define (or redefine) and employ a “public philosophy.”

World War I in the History of Globalization

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 112-132
Author(s):  
Carl Strikwerda
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Economic History ◽  
World Economy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Ties

World War I is the most important single event in the history of globalization. The war ended the first significant era of increasing economic ties among nations and thereby shaped the economic history of the twentieth century. The war set off both a search for ways to re-create the prewar liberal world economy and attempts to create statist alternatives to it. The collapse of interbank cooperation and expansion of controls on trade, migration, and agriculture meant that economic globalization re-emerged only very slowly over the rest of the twentieth century. Indeed, the long-term effects of World War I lasted until the 1990s. The lesson of this story for the twenty-first century is to check the dangers inherent in a multipolar world, where globalization produces both economic growth and social tensions.

scholarly journals The dynamic intensity of CO 2 emissions: empirical evidence for the 20 th century

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 772-788
Author(s):  
DIEGO CARNEIRO ◽  
GUILHERME IRFFI
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Emission Intensity ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Price Shocks ◽  
Original Source ◽  
The Great Depression

ABSTRACT The debate around the economic growth and environmental degradation is the hot topic among academics. However, up to a point, all of them embrace the uncontroversial view that tells us that anthropic factors have leverage on global climate. It happens that the so-called greenhouse effect is closely related to the accumulation of certain gases in the atmosphere, e.g., carbon dioxide, whose original source comes from productive sectors. Thus, our purpose in this article is to estimate the rate of emission intensity - here we mean the ratio between CO2 emissions and GDP - which has increased since the early part of the 20th century. To support that idea, this study reports on data from 24 different countries. In terms of C02 emission, the results undoubtedly show that United Kingdom and the United States highlight a negative picture, particularly when both are compared to India. It should be noted the presence of structural changes, which coincide with three major historical events: the World War I (1914-1918), the Great Depression in the 1930s, and finally the Oil-price shocks in the 1970s. As the result of the analysis demonstrates, the amount of emission produced by developing countries is surprisingly low. That the technology reveals its relative merit for reducing the overall emission intensity is transparently obvious.

scholarly journals Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: Lessons from Past Productivity Booms

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger W Ferguson ◽  
William L Wascher
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Productivity Growth ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Strong Trend ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The U.S

A number of observers argue that the present era of robust trend productivity growth will soon come to an end. Others contend that the potential gains to productivity from the technological advances associated with the computer revolution are far from complete. In assessing the likelihood of these alternative outcomes, one should recognize that periods of strong trend productivity growth, although perhaps novel to many of us, are not new to the U.S. economy. In particular, three earlier periods of strong trend productivity growth stand out from the historical record as especially worthy of further scrutiny for the lessons they may offer regarding the current episode: the late 1800s from roughly the end of the Civil War to around 1890; the decade or so between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression; and the period from about 1950 to the early 1970s.

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