Alan Dye

Avoiding Holdup: Asset Specificity and Technical Change in the Cuban Sugar Industry, 1899–1929

Asset specificity can have profound influences on the economic structure of a country. An example is post-colonial Cuba. This article demonstrates that the existence of site specificity in assets generated problems of holdup for sugar mill owners in their contractual relations with cane suppliers. Recognition of that incentive structure offers an institutional explanation for the post-1900 concentration of U.S. investment in the eastern provinces. To reduce transaction costs, mill managers avoided investing in the western part of the island where the sugar industry was well established. A consequence was the relative decline of the western region. People have become accustomed to thinking of Cuba as isolated from western capitalism, but in the nineteenth century that was far from the case. Cuba had one of the more innovative and advanced sugar industries in the world; it was a leader in the adoption of both steam power and vacuum-heating technologies in sugar manufacture.,1 After the Cuban War of Independence (1895 to 1898), producers wanted to regain that status, this time with closer political ties to their major market, the United States.2 For the first time, North American direct investment was attracted in a big way to the Cuban sugar industry, but surprisingly it did not seem to reinforce the once highly competitive establishment that had been located in the western provinces before the

The Political Economy of Land Privatization in Argentina and Australia, 1810-1850: A Puzzle

This paper compares public land privatization in New South Wales and the Province of Buenos Aires,in the early nineteenth century. Both claimed frontier lands as public lands for raising revenue. New South Wales failed to enforce its claim. Property rights originated as de facto squatters’ claims, which government subsequently accommodated and enforced as de jure property rights. In Buenos Aires, by contrast, original transfers of public lands were specified de jure by government. The paper develops a model that explains these differences as a consequence of violence and the relative cost of enforcement of government claims to public land.

Producción en masa del azúcar cubano, 1899–1929: Economías de escala y elección de técnicas

Ciertos cambios tecnologicos dotaron a Cuba de una de las industrias azucareras mas avanzadas del mundo en la primera mitad del presente siglo. En este trabajo mostramos cuantitativamente que las tecnicas de produccion en la fabricacion de azucar, como en muchas otras industrias de elaboracion, experimentaron enormes incrementos en sus escalas optimas debido a la adopcion de tecnologias de proceso continuo y de produccion en masa. En Estados Unidos estas mismas tecnologias de proceso continuo fueron las que anunciaron la revolucion en la gestion administrativa al estilo Chandler. En Cuba, la gran fabrica azucarera de comienzo de siglo, para adoptar una perspectiva global, no era el latifundio de antano; era un elemento de la gran empresa industrial del siglo XX, e indicaba participacion global y liderazgo industrial en las tecnicas recientemente transformadas de fabricacion del azucar.

The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876–1929. By Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, and Noel Maurer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xx, 382.

that exclusion and marginalization followed emancipation. This attitude against Brazilians of African origin continued until the twentieth century. For those economic historians who like explicit hypothesis testing and clear counterfactuals, this might be the wrong book to read in order to understand the economics of abolition in Brazil. The book is not a horserace of the hypotheses that might have led to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself. On the contrary, it explicitly argues that it is hard to pick a winner among existing hypotheses and tries to call our attention to slave resistance as another plausible explanation. In the end, economic historians will be left wanting more. For instance, there seems to be a problem of causality (endogeneity). We do not know how much slave resistance actually caused any of the abolitionist legislation or if some forms of resistance were simply fueled by the abolitionist movement in Europe and Brazil. The merit of the book, however, will be as a fun and useful starter for undergraduate students interested in the abolition of slavery in Brazil.