Prosperity Index Research Articles

Changing Places: Britain's Demographic, Economic and Social Complexion

The authors examine the impact of labor force changes and residential mobility on population size and characteristics in regions of Great Britain. 1 introduces the principal dimensions of socio-economic change which this study will be measuring describes the basis of the Functional Regions perspective and outlines the main features and applications of this approach which we will be using. The next six chapters examine in turn the most important demographic economic and social characteristics which give places their distinctive complexion. Topics explored include changes in population distribution and structure with a focus on increases in the elderly and ethnic minority populations and decreases in average household size; the evolution of the labor force; employment trends; unemployment including long-term and youth unemployment; and selected other indicators of socioeconomic status. Finally Chapter 8 draws on a small selection of key criteria to construct an Index of Local Economic Prosperity which measures the recent dynamism of cities and towns in Britain.... (EXCERPT)

Late Medieval Urban Prosperity: A Rejoinder

The first is about incorporation. Incorporation was sheer unalloyed conspicuous consumption in the later Middle Ages. All the good that charters could do, from a business point of view, they had already done. It did not check Salisbury's rise to the top as a leading provincial town that it remained the manor of the Bishop until i6I2, with charters until then which gave it few, if any, advantages greater than those that the burgesses of St Albans or Bury St Edmunds had been able to wring from their Abbots. Nor, I imagine, did it really help London, as a business centre, to have accumulated over the centuries the most illustrious collection of charter rights of any town in the kingdom. The one protection that incorporation might conceivably have conferred upon civic officers it signally failed to provide. So we are dealing with a piece of lawyer's nonsense, skilfully contrived to appeal to the trumpery pretensions of the burgess class. The fashion for incorporation spread fairly slowly at first. But certain prominent medieval towns, with lawyers on their pay-rolls, though well-known for their heart-rending appeals to the king for relief from taxation on account of abject communal poverty, nevertheless managed to stump up the money for this theatrical flummery. Historians who are deeply impressed by the pleas of poverty ought not to ignore evidence which suggests that those who plead for remission of taxation are not always short of money. This is one such piece of evidence, trifling, perhaps, but suggestive. I made a passing reference to it. Prof. Tittler, however, treats it as if it were one of the more substantial elements of my argument; and then makes the tiresome mistake of supposing that I was in fact, though not in so many words, constructing an index of prosperity by counting the number of towns which had bought their way into the incorporation league. He is, of course, entirely at liberty to construct any number of indexes, provided only that he excludes me from any association with, or complicity in, them; for I cannot imagine a more misleading and indeed pointless way of studying urban prosperity.

Mosaic Pavements as an Index of Prosperity and Fashion

(1980). Mosaic Pavements as an Index of Prosperity and Fashion. Levant: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 112-134.

Mosaic Pavements as an Index of Prosperity and Fashion

Mosaic Pavements as an Index of Prosperity and Fashion

Some aspects of corrosion research

The industrial expansion of the post‐war period has resulted in the development of new products and processes, specialised equipment and new materials of construction. Materials science, technology and engineering, has emerged as an independent discipline during the last decade. These changes have brought up the importance of corrosion problems and the urgency to apply preventive methods. It is probably true to say at the present time that the losses due to metallic corrosion give a fair index of the industrial prosperity of a nation. A developing country like India had to face the challenge posed by corrosion, and there is now an increasing awareness of the imperative need for corrosion research and the application of the findings to meet specific situations.

Early Twentieth Century Business Cycles in Canada

Canada's economic development during the first two decades of the twentieth century has been examined intensively by such writers as Viner, Meier, and Ingram. Viner claimed that Canadian experience from 1900–1913 clearly demonstrated the working of the classic specie flow mechanism and the international operation of the quantity theory of money. Meier re-examined the period, and in the light of additional evidence concluded that dynamic forces of economic development (expansion of the wheat economy, and later capital inflows) dominated the Canadian record during the period. Ingram also argued that rapid expansion of the economy after 1900 created investment opportunities and attracted an inflow of foreign funds that was closely linked to the development boom. More recently, Borts has suggested an important role for export prices in inaugurating the era of expansion.This emphasis on long-run economic performance has detracted attention from short-run variations in the Canadian economy during the pre-war period. Some work in this area was attempted by Taylor and Michell, who built a composite annual index of prosperity to define cyclical swings in a rough way, and by Mitchell and Thorp who provided an annual sketch of conditions in several countries including Canada.The precise dating of business cycle turning points in Canada owes much to the pioneering work of Chambers. He has produced tentative reference cycle turning points for the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and for the period from 1919 to 1955. The only portion of the post-Confederation century yet to be analysed in this manner is therefore the period from 1900 to 1919.

Spring and Winter Wheat on the Columbia Plateau

A N INVESTIGATION of the allocation of land to spring and winter wheat in the Columbia Plateau illustrates a common fallacy of broad regional studies. In such studies the facts of locality, of subtle differences within a region, are often obscured by generalized treatment. Hence on somewhat closer examination a speciously homogeneous region is found to have apparently contradictory adjustments to the general scheme of environmental elements. The wheat area of the Columbia Plateau is a case in point. At first observation the region is, environmentally, fairly homogeneous. Its mean elevation is approximately 2,000 feet (Figure 1). Its soils are prevailingly silt loams and overlie a ubiquitous basaltic bed rock. Its precipitation (Figure 2) though increasing perceptibly from west to east is nearly everywhere marginal in quantity and falls mostly in the winter season. The vegetation reflects the semi-aridity and aridity of the region by ranging from sage brush in the drier phases of the climate to bunch grass in the wetter phases in the east. That the outstanding adjustment made by man to this environmental complex is dry f arming with wheat is not surprising. Indeed, so heavily dependent is the livelihood of the entire region upon this one crop that the yield and price of wheat for any given year becomes the vital regional index of prosperity. Yet that this region is given over both to spring and winter wheat is a seeming contradiction to the general homogeneity of the environmental scheme. Seemingly, deducing from the general facts of the region, there exists no close relationship between the two seasonal wheats and the environment; or if there does, this relationship is ignored by the farmers of the region; or the general facts of the region are an inadequate basis for the interpretation of this apparently contradictory adjustment. The last hypothesis, in the particular case in point, proves upon a close scrutiny of the intra-regional facts to be the true one.

Readjustment of American Industries through the Development of Foreign Trade

THE future index of the domestic prosperity of the United States will be the volume of the exports of its manufactures. With production capacity, fabricating skill and merchandizing ability all in excess of domestic requirements, the solution to the kindred problems of maintaining domestic financial stability and absorption of available labor lies in a constant enlargement of our export tradings. Fortunately our foreign trade-both exports and imports-can be tremendously increased. It is entirely a matter of national vision. Merchandise, transportation, banking facilities, selling ability and sources of accurate and complete information on foreign markets are already in existence. There is no need for alchemy. The one need is the enlargement of national vision to include foreign trade as a national necessity and not as a national plaything. There are today thousands of converts to our need of international commercial exchange. The immediate requirement is positive action and not academic acquiescence in truisms. The full idea has not yet been merchandised to the manufacturers of the United States. Attention has been attracted to foreign trade. Desire for possession has been aroused. But only in a small, almost negligible, percentage of cases has positive and progressive action taken place. The export trade of the United States today is in the same position that the Panama Canal occupied in 1900. The idea of an Isthmial Canal had then attracted a country-wide attention. Its possession was desired as a national asset. But constructive action of the inevitably right nature had not resulted. Today we are lnquestionably headed in the right direction in our export trade. We have advanced further and more sanely than the De