Economic History Research Articles

Environmental Efficiency of Agriculture in Visegrád Group Countries vs. the EU and the World

The production of foodstuffs for an ever-increasing population is the basic, irreducible and unalienable function of agriculture. It involves environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions. This is what makes it so important to examine the levels of environmental efficiency of agriculture. As countries differ in their emission levels, it is reasonable to look for what determines them. Hence, the purpose of this study was to identify the changes in the environmental efficiency of agriculture in Visegrád Group countries and worldwide in 1961–2020. These countries share a similar economic history and demonstrate comparable environmental and geographic conditions, making it possible to pinpoint the factors responsible for how the parameters covered by the study change over time. The research used data from the FAOSTAT database. Environmental efficiency of agriculture was defined as the relationship between production volumes in kilocalories and emissions. Initially, this parameter deteriorated in the Visegrád countries, but since the late 1970s it has improved, first linked to the crisis of the socialist economy and its collapse (including a drastic decline in livestock production) and then to the implementation of CAP instruments.

Examining Factors Contributing to the Entrenchment and Collapse of Authoritarianism Through the Lens of the Arab Spring

Abstract: This paper hopes to examine the reasons contributing to the failure of the Arab Spring to culminate in a lasting change in political reform and democratisation. The article utilises frameworks by previous authors to explain the phenomenon of the short-lived democracies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as well as provide additional insights of the author in obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the reason why autocratic states are so entrenched within MENA. At the end of this, the aim is to provide political substantiations regarding the failure of the Arab Spring, as opposed to the current focus surrounding violence and civil war as the driver to stunted democratic growth and autocratic resurgence. The article concludes that MENA countries are uniquely situated by their social, political and economic institutions and history that make democratic growth difficult unless as a means to achieve another priority, such as economic prosperity. This can be extrapolated towards analysing the behaviours of a variety of other states, democratic or autocratic, in their interactions with their population and foreign states.

Data and contemporary economics: role, paradox and development

PurposeA more accurate comprehension of data elements and the exploration of new laws governing contemporary data in both theoretical and practical domains constitute a significant research topic.Design/methodology/approachBased on the perspective of evolutionary economics, this paper re-examines economic history and existing literature to study the following: changes in the “connotation of production factors” in economics caused by the evolution of production factors; the economic paradoxes formed by data in the context of social production processes and business models, which traditional theoretical frameworks fail to solve; the disruptive innovation of classical theory of value by multiple theories of value determination and the conflicts between the data market monopoly as well as the resulting distribution of value and the real economic society. The research indicates that contemporary advancements in data have catalyzed transformative innovation within the field of economics.FindingsThe research indicates that contemporary advancements in data have catalyzed disruptive innovation in the field of economics.Originality/valueThis paper, grounded in academic research, identifies four novel issues arising from contemporary data that cannot be adequately addressed within the confines of the classical economic theoretical framework.

Imports and Market Integration in the Roman Mediterranean

The degree and nature of integration that existed within Roman economies is a crucial but so far unresolved question within the study of ancient economic history. This paper aims to test the level of market integration in the Roman Mediterranean by comparing amphora distributions from the late Republican period and Principate with those of Late Antiquity in Rome, three northern Adriatic cities (Aquileia, Padua, Verona) and Ephesus with the predicted transport costs provided by ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. The intention is to analyze whether price determined the distribution of staple goods in the Roman Empire, as it does in a modern market economy environment, or whether other factors (e.g., state orders, elite connections etc.) were more important in shaping ancient economic practices.

Looking Ahead - The Future of Economic History

This paper considers recent developments in economic history and asks what the future holds for the discipline on the island of Ireland.

‘Neoliberalism, far-right politics, and the shrinking White middle class in Southern California’s Inland Empire’

ABSTRACT This article examines far-right, authoritarian politics among middle-class White communities of the Inland Empire region of Southern California. Grounded in a materialist theoretical framework and an analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews and the recent political-economic history of the region, I interrogate the political and social attitudes of study participants in relation to their experiences and perceptions of changing political-economic and sociocultural conditions in Southern California in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon Gramsci and the critical theoretical literature on authoritarian populism and neoliberalism, I consider how study participants’ authoritarian politics and ideologies reflect a reactionary political response to processes associated with the reorganization of racialized capital accumulation under neoliberalism. I argue that the appeal of these movements is, in part, how they provide commonsense (hegemonic) explanations for economic precarity, demographic shifts, and immigration, among other issues, while at the same time normalizing this increasingly exploitative and brutal regime of capital accumulation.

Penganggaran dan Pembiayaan Pendidikan yang Efektif dan Efisien

In several ways, the sharia accounting system is different from conventional accounting. However, there are axiomatic technical similarities between the two. By using descriptive qualitative methods, this research aims to provide the author with an understanding of accounting theory and practice in Islamic economics. The research results show that the perspective of accounting science in Islamic economic practice focuses on the use of an accounting system that is in accordance with sharia principles, which prioritizes truth, accuracy and fairness. Surah Al-Baqarah verse 282 emphasizes clear and accurate transaction recording, the use of honest writers, financial accountability, zakat, and transparency and fairness in accounting. The results of this research conclude that there are many ways to see the economic implications of Islam today. First, Islamic economics must adapt to technological changes because they have influenced the way people think and act. Second, the history of Islamic economics has changed in the modern era, and third, Islamic economics is now real and relevant with the development of digital technology. Fourth, the concept of Islamic economics is based on the Koran and Sunnah. Compared to Conventional Accounting: Sharia accounting systems differ from conventional accounting in several key aspects. However, there are axiomatic technical similarities between the two.

Retrospectives: Friedman and Schwartz, Disaggregated

What was the contribution of Anna Schwartz to the landmark book she co-authored with Milton Friedman, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960? A close examination of archival evidence suggests three primary contributions Schwartz made to the work, and to Friedman’s career more generally. The first was meeting the classic challenge of quantitative economic history: going into the field to locate and collect archival data that had been assembled for purposes unrelated to economic research, and deciding how best to use that data. Second, Schwartz had a decades-long role as technical sounding board and shaper of the statistical approach taken in the book. Schwartz’s third and arguably greatest contribution was to transform A Monetary History of the United States into a compelling narrative argument that made an impact far beyond the economics profession. Together, these findings show Schwartz to be a scholar who made significant and lasting contributions to monetary economics, economic history, and the broader field of economics.

Semiconductors and Modern Industrial Policy

Semiconductors have emerged as a headline in the resurgence of modern industrial policy. This paper explores the political economic history of the sector, the changing nature of the semiconductor supply chain, and the new sources of concern that have motivated the most recent turn to government intervention. It also explores details of that turn to industrial policy by the United States, China, Japan, Europe, South Korea, and Taiwan. Modern industrial policy for semiconductors has included not only subsidies for manufacturing, but also new import tariffs, export controls, foreign investment screening, and antitrust actions.

Towards a history of behavioural and experimental economics in France

Existing histories of behavioral and experimental economics (BE-XP) are primarily focused on its developments in the United States. While French economist Maurice Allais made significant contributions in the 1950s, the subsequent trajectory of BE-XP in France is understudied. This article addresses this gap by comparing the history of BE-XP in France to international trends previously identified in the literature. We find that, after an initial ambivalent influence from Allais, French BE-XP subsequently aligned with international trends. We nevertheless identify some distinctive national features in utility measurement and social preference modeling that are heterogeneously distributed across the French territory.

Faster extraction of matrimonial advertisements from digital archives using a signal processing pipeline: a case study on a 20th-Century Spanish newspaper

ABSTRACT With the exponential growth of digitized historical materials, historians and social scientists face the daunting task of navigating vast online collections. While online archives do provide search tools to query their materials, these usually do not meet the scholars’ need to trace and store all relevant materials from the online archive. This case study shows how computer vision methods, and more specifically a signal processing approach, can be used to identify, classify and extract relevant information items from a vast historical data collection. More specifically, this study reports the results of the construction of a data pipeline that extracts matrimonial advertisements from the digitized Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia. Matrimonial advertisements can provide genuine insights into the evolution of partner preferences over time, but they are hard to collect as they are scattered over millions of digitized historical newspapers and magazines. Moreover, to study variation in partner preferences by, for example, sex, social class, matrimonial status and time period, it is necessary to store the data into a database. The pipeline that we have constructed extracts matrimonial advertisements in a stepwise fashion, encompassing identification, through binarisation and segmentation, and classification based on Optical Character Recognition. By ways of a comprehensive evaluation, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the efficacy of the pipeline for the extraction of matrimonial advertisements is demonstrated. The findings not only underscore the viability of the signal processing approach but also underscore its potential for advancing research in historical demography, family history, as well as economic history, as similar pipelines can be set up to extract other relevant newspaper items, such as, marriage, birth, death and moving announcements, job vacancies or business announcements from digitized source collections.

Bagehot’s giant bubble failure

Modern economic history literature has extensive coverage of the Overend, Gurney crash of 1866 and the associated Lender of Last Resort operations of the Bank of England. But it basically ignores the giant British investment mania of the 1860s that led to that crisis and to the crisis of 1867 that followed. Yet that mania has many other interesting features that are relevant for dealing with bubbles. In particular, that historical episode shows that high interest rates may not suffice to deflate a bubble. It also demonstrates the dangers of “financial innovation,” which flowered in that period and enabled promoters to mislead and ruin investors in novel ways, while producing a rapid expansion of the railway system that escaped public notice. Even some of the most sophisticated contemporary observers, such as Walter Bagehot, who were bothered by the market anomalies they saw, were deceived by that pioneering “financial engineering” which has strong similarities to the one that led to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. This paper points out some of the many neglected aspects of that mania. Those include an illustration of the evolution of economic thought towards ignoring underlying causes of financial crises and concentrating just on the panics in which they culminate.

Resource nationalism: the intersection of politics and economics

Resource nationalism has a complex economic, political, and cultural history and reality. The evolution of the supply and demand structure of the global mineral metal market influences it. It is closely linked to the “economic-political” system within resource-rich countries. We analyze the ‘economic-political’ logic of resource nationalist behavior using the two-tier game theory. We examine 261 cases of resource nationalism since 1990 and test the theoretical hypotheses using quantitative techniques. The results show that rising mineral prices are the main trigger for contemporary resource nationalism. However, ideology, institutional quality, social climate, and economic dependence within resource countries play a non-negligible role. Resource wealth dependence in host countries makes it difficult for policymakers to escape national resource interventions. We argue that (1) The global economic trading system imbalance is the root of resource nationalism. (2) Resource nationalism is an endeavor by resource-rich countries to seek entitlements from mineral resource endowments. (3) Resource nationalism is not a zero-sum competition in the national economic trading system. In the face of the potential risks posed by resource nationalism to the global supply of minerals, the relevant interest groups should have sufficient strategic reserves to cope with the possible game of interests.

Institutional Imprints and Corporate Misconduct: Unravelling the Interplay of Economic History and Firm Choices on Earnings Manipulation in an Emerging Economy

This study investigates the impact of firms’ legacy institutional imprints on its engagement in corporate misconduct. We discover that a closed economic regime’s protectionist policies inscribe imprints in the form of opaque organizational routines and cause incumbent firms to develop competitive limitations. Utilizing the theoretical principles of the organizational imprinting theory, this research attests to the endurance of corruptive routines and argues that the degree of closed economy imprints increases firms’ engagement in income-increasing earnings management in the post-liberalization period. Furthermore, we find that the impact of imprints is weakened by firms’ choices on international exposure and internal innovation. By utilizing the historical data on Indian economic policies from 1956 to 1991 and analyzing a sample of 18,432 firm-year observations for 2,396 listed Indian manufacturing firms from 1997 to 2007, we find support for our hypotheses.

The Vlachs in Ottoman Borderlands: The Sanjak of Klis in the Middle of the 16th Century

The paper proposes the study of the Vlach population of the Ottoman Dalmatian hinterland in the middle of the 16th century, as described in the tax register (defter) of the sanjak of Klis from 1550, a document that allows for a better understanding of the social and economic history of southwestern Bosnia and the Herzegovina and parts of Lika, Krbava and Dalmatia, which all formed this administrational unit since 1537. The analysis outlined in the case study includes the problem of cross-border migrations, the specificity of transhumant economy, and the functioning of the “Vlach law” as well as the general status of the Vlach community in the Ottoman Empire, which can be also traced thanks to the abovementioned register. This document testifies that Vlachs were used to populate borderland areas, as it mentions that they settled in some deserted territories. Their migrations, which were sometimes caused by the colonization initiated by the authorities of the states (Venice, Habsburg Monarchy and Ottoman Empire) were partially facilitated by the internal social connections that characterized the Vlach community. The register clearly indicates that transhumance pastoralism practiced since the Early Middle Ages remained the main activity of the Vlachs in 16th century. Some of them also cultivated the land, although agriculture never became their main economic activity.

Islamic Entrepreneur in the Business Concept of Prophet Muhammad SAW: A Conceptual Review

This research examines the concept of Islamic entrepreneurship based on the Prophet Muhammad's business practices and its relevance to the modern business context. Through a systematic literature review method, this research analyses primary and secondary sources on the history of Islamic economics, the biography of Prophet Muhammad, and contemporary literature on Islamic business ethics. The main findings show that the Prophet's business practices were based on fundamental Islamic principles such as tawhid, justice, and social responsibility. The main characteristics of Prophet Muhammad's busines s include honesty, professionalism, quality orientation, focus on customer satisfaction, and fair partne rship. This research reveals that the concept of Islamic entrepreneurship has strong relevance to the contemporary business context, especially in the asp ects of business ethics, leadership with integrity, and corporate social responsibility. Although its implementation faces challenges such as lack of in depth understanding and conflict with conventional systems, there are significant opportunities for the development of Islamic entrepreneurship, especially in countries with large Muslim populations. The s tudy concludes that the concept of Islamic entrepreneurship offers a more ethical, sustainable and benefit oriented business paradigm, which can provide inspiration for global efforts in building a more just economic system. Recommendations are put forward for business practitioners, policy makers, academics, educational institutions, and Islamic business organizations to encourage the implementation and further development of this concept.

Economic Aspects of the Development of Civil Society Institutions in the Late Imperial Period on the Example of the Smolensk House of Diligence

The study of the history of charity makes it possible to more accurately identify the initial period of the creation of the foundations of civil society in Russia. The article is devoted to the analysis of the activities of the Smolensk House of Diligence as an example of charitable practice in the Russian Empire of the late XIX – early XX century. Using a specific example, the author examines the history of the creation and development of houses of diligence in the regional plane, their role in public life and their influence on the formation of basic narratives of civil society in the imperial reality of that period. Special attention is paid to the analysis of economic aspects within the framework of the Smolensk House of Diligence and their role in the formation of new principles of “non-pedigree” communication in the society of post-reform Russia. The study allows the author to conclude that the study of projects such as the activities of charitable societies through the prism of economic history makes it possible to more fully assess them in the context of the power aspirations of local social groups and the importance of these actors in the formation of civil society in the late Imperial period.

Economic and Social History Society of Ireland Secretary's Report to the Annual General Meeting 18 November 2023

Economic and Social History Society of Ireland Secretary's Report to the Annual General Meeting 18 November 2023

Changes in Mental Health Among Adolescents in South Korea Before and After COVID-19: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis From 2015 to 2022

PurposeThis study aimed to examine changes in mental health among adolescents by comparing data from the period following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic with the period before the pandemic. MethodsWe estimated the annual prevalence of stress perception, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation among middle and high school students using data from the Korean Youth Health Behavior Survey spanning from 2015 to 2022. We then compared mental health status across 2 periods—pre-COVID-19 (2015–2019) and during COVID-19 (2020–2022)—employing an interrupted time series analysis. We adjusted for covariates, such as household economic status, residence type, self-rated health, and history of hospitalization, due to violence. ResultsWe analyzed data from 472,385 adolescents (242,819 boys and 230,016 girls). Stress perception, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation showed an increasing trend during the pre-COVID-19 period, followed by a decrease in the first year of the pandemic and an increasing trend in the second and third years. Boys experienced a faster increase in stress and depressive symptoms during the second and third years of the pandemic compared with the pre-COVID-19 period, whereas girls showed trends similar to those observed before the pandemic. Middle school students experienced a more rapid increase in these indicators than high school students during the second and third years. DiscussionAdolescents' mental health initially improved in the first year of COVID-19 but worsened during the second and third years of the pandemic. This suggests a need for intervention policies and programs to support adolescent mental health.

Greek history

The new paradigm of ancient economic history that has dominated the last twenty years is based on New Institutional Economics; its key concepts are growth and transaction costs. It has succeeded in proving that the ancient economies were not static and in documenting the significance of ancient markets; but by excising labour, slavery, and exploitation from discussion, the conceptual limits of this paradigm are becoming apparent to more and more people. The volume edited by John Weisweiler on debt in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East is solid evidence that an alternative, non-neoliberal, paradigm is currently in the process of formation.1 The book is obviously an attempt to assess the validity of David Graeber's blockbuster book on debt for the study of ancient economic and social history.2 As with the volume on citizenship presented below, the fact that this collection of twelve essays ranges temporally from the archaic period to the early middle ages and includes Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern societies is an excellent illustration of a growing and encouraging trend in our discipline. This is a highly stimulating volume. The essays explore: the nexus between coinage, slavery, and warfare in various ancient societies; how quantified social obligations colonized various social, political, and intellectual fields; and whether Graeber's concept of the Axial Age is valuable for the study of ancient history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Graeber's model seems to fit best the world of ancient empires (Roman, late Roman, and Sassanian), but seems to make less sense for the world of Greek poleis. This illustrates, yet again, the need for Greek historians to think seriously about the peculiarities of the Greek world and the appropriate comparisons.