Paying for Old Age: Past, Present, Future

This chapter focuses on one fundamental aspects of an ageing population — how to pay for old age, individually and collectively. It also presents a study of the history of old age support in the UK and US and concludes that despite the quite different beginnings of the public pension and social security systems, government policy in both countries has become similarly locked in to a set of institutional arrangements which were devised to respond to immediate social and economic problems, but which have acquired a rationale and a dynamic of their own.

The Human Body in Britain: Past and Future

This chapter explores evidence on the changing shape of the British human body, in particular its height and weight, in order to shed light on the past and possibly future standard of living of the British population. It focuses on anthropometric measures (based on height, weight, and body mass index) that are employed as indicators of material welfare of the population.

Technological Systems and Comparative Systems of Innovation: From Historical Performance to Future Policy Guidelines

This chapter looks at the comparative systems approach to understanding the way in which different institutional regimes affect the governance of technological development. It focuses on four institutional constraints: market failure, government failure, corporate failure, and network failure. Each has the potential to impede or disconnect the linkage between the production of technology and the use or adoption of technology.

English Apprenticeship: A Neglected Factor in the First Industrial Revolution

This chapter examines the role of apprenticeship in the British Industrial Revolution. The apprenticeship system contributed in four ways. First, it provided training of necessary skills in the expanding area of employment and newer sectors. Second, it promoted efficient training among masters and men. Third, it reduced the transaction costs involved in transferring resources from agriculture to non-agriculture and facilitated the expansion of sectors which promoted trade and commerce. Finally, apprenticeship saved poor children from social exclusion and enabled them to become more productive adults. The chapter also suggests that the apprenticeship system also created a structure of contract enforcement which ensured that both masters and trainees would derive the benefits from human capital accumulation.

Height and the High Life: What Future for a Tall Story?

This chapter discusses height as a reliable indicator of health status and standard of living. It also suggests that mapping from height to other measures of well-being has attracted the attention of economic historians. The history of heights may prove to be a useful means by which economic historians can better explain the past. The first area is social history, and in particular family history, in the developed world. The second is the economic history of those countries or areas with limited amounts of other data.

Economic Welfare Measurements and Human Well-being

This chapter focuses on alternative ways of measuring social welfare. These alternative measurements follow three approaches. The first involves extending the national accounts to incorporate non-market goods and services and to eliminate detrimental components. A second approach identifies social norms and evaluates their satisfaction through social indicators. The third approach involves the use of psychological indicators and attempts to reach directly into the experience of welfare using surveys of subjected well-being and research on the dynamics of hedonic experience.

Rational Resistance to Land Privatization: The Behaviour of Russia’s Rural Producers in Response to Agrarian Reforms, 1861–2000

This chapter analyses rural opposition to land privatization in the post-Soviet transition era that draws explicit parallels with the resistance by Russian peasants to early twentieth-century government programmes of land reform. It focuses on the failure of the effort to extend the policy of privatization to farmland, and the collapse of marketed output from the agricultural sector's large koholz units.

The Industrious Revolution and Economic Growth, 1650–1830

This chapter examines the scope and intensity of productive labour and its relationship to consumer aspirations. It demonstrates that changes in consumption demands play a role in the process of industrialization. The first ‘industrious revolution’ within the household sector reinforced significant changes in business organization, affecting both the international wholesale trade and the retail provision of goods. This phenomenon paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, which was advanced by new technologies and changes in organization.

Ideology and the Shadow of History: A Perspective on the Great Depression

The Great Depression is one of those seminal events in the modern world economy on which policy-makers and market participants rely when formulating their conceptions of how market economies behave. This chapter examines the international monetary policy formation during the Great Depression. It argues that the ideology of the gold standard led policy-makers to take actions that accentuated economic distress in the 1930s.

Lessons from Italy’s Monetary Unification (1862–1880) for the Euro and Europe’s Single Market

This chapter examines the effects of monetary unification on market integration. It offers a new perspective on the Euro's likely effectiveness in achieving the ‘Single Market’ goal of European economic integration, by examining the impact of a nineteenth-century national currency reform. It looks back at the experience of Italian monetary unification after 1861 and describes how rapidly the prices of the basic factors of production, wages, and interest rates began to converge after the introduction of the national currency.