Jonas Ljungberg

The impact of the great emigration on the Swedish economy

Abstract In the half-century before 1914 wages in Sweden advanced from below the West European average to being at a level with those in Britain. This remarkable record has seldom been addressed, but the very rapid concurrent Swedish economic growth is well known. The present article argues that the increase in wages was not only due to industrialisation, but that another major factor was the trans-Atlantic emigration, which drained the supply of labour. Central to the argument is that this effect of emigration interacted with. a structural change within the Swedish economy. The traditional export industries faced stiffening competition, and could not afford the higher wages. But the newly emerging branches of industry relied on modern technology, could pay their workers more, and grew. The article explores factors of demand and supply in the Swedish labour market, and on the basis ofd~ta at the county level the emigration elasticity of growth in daywages is estimated. A tentative counterfactual case conf...

Domestic markets and international integration: paths to industrialisation in the Nordic countries

Abstract This article scrutinises the role of structural change and foreign trade in the Nordic countries, except Iceland, in industrialization prior to 1914. Sector contribution to GDP as well as the role of the foreign trade is compared across the countries. The comparison uncovers different paths to industrialization that cannot be explained by reference to received views, such as the shock of free trade or open economy forces. Denmark was not only richer than the rest of the ‘Nordic Periphery’ but also earlier in industrialization. Furthermore, agriculture had a much neglected role in Swedish catch-up, and despite its relatively large export sector, Norway lagged behind, as did Finland. Economic growth was characterised not only by rising exports but also by capital imports and increasing consumption, indicating wider economic and social change. Different sector structures in the Nordic countries largely explain why there was no clear pattern of catch-up or convergence, neither in the region nor in relation to the Western European leaders. We conclude that the social capability of the Nordic countries to integrate and respond to external influences 1850–1914 must be seen in the perspective of the evolving domestic markets and the prior establishment of market institutions.

Population and Living Standards, 1870-1914

This chapter provides the first all-European overview of diverse aspects of living standards in a period when industrialisation and modernity began to show up in substantial improvements in general living conditions. Most obvious is this seen in the increase of life expectancy. A substantial contribution came from the decline in infant mortality which occurred almost simultaneously over large parts of Europe, despite levels were very different. An explanation is suggested for bot the similarity in the change and the difference in levels. Other treated aspects of living standards consider urbanisation with sanitary systems, income distribution and an application of the Human Development Index.

Technology and Human Capital in Historical Perspective: An Introduction

Few would deny that technological change has transformed both production and everyday life since pre-industrial times. The implications of this statement produce divergent opinions, however. Even if it is mostly agreed that everyday life has changed for the better, opinions differ on how technology has altered production, and continues to do so. For example, the inter-play between technological change and economic growth has been labelled a ‘black box’ (Rosenberg 1982; 1994). It is difficult to know what goes on inside the black box, and it is hard to find factors that determine technological change, or at least to find a linear relation between certain factors and the economic performance. Throughout history efforts have been made to incorporate technological or technical change into economics, but no coherent theory has earned universal consent.2 Mainstream economics have instead regarded technology as a given exogenous factor that greatly influences the economy but which is not itself affected by the economy. Recently this has changed among economists with the emergence of endogenous growth theory. For economic historians, however, technological change is an old issue. The present book is an attempt to combine different approaches to technological change. Common to these approaches is the dimension of time, whether nineteenth-century history or the more recent past.

The EMU in a European perspective; Lessons from Monetary Regimes in the Twentieth Century

Exchange rate economics is surrounded by mystery. For example, in a recent article in the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter (19 April 2003), four former and present chairmen of the board of the Bank of Sweden, the most well-known of which was the former finance minister Feldt, came up with the following propositions: 1. Sweden has benefited from a fixed exchange rate during ‘most of the 20th century’. 2. ‘Large parts of Europe’ have benefited from fixed exchange rates during the last two decades. 3. As a testimony to that Denmark, with fixed exchange rate, is compared with floating Sweden: during the last two decades the living standard of the average Danish household has overtaken and forged ahead of the average Swedish household.

Prices and industrial transformation

Abstract One of the contradictions of neo-classical economic theory concerns its view of relative prices. On the one hand it is relative prices that determine the markets equilibrium position and decide what transactions will take place. On the other hand, the pattern of relative prices, or expressed differently the price structure, has been regarded as more or less immutable. Variations in relative prices have been considered short-term phenomena, after which, in time, an adaptation has taken place which has restored the initial situation. The same line of thought was also held by Wesley Mitchell, who in the dispersion of relative prices found a reflection of business cycles, but he maintained that the price system is “yet stable in the essential balance of its interrelations”.1 F.C. Mills cited Mitchell as his authority in his comprehensive work The Behavior of Prices, and although he felt compelled to raise objections to the inference that relative prices varied rhythmically with the business cycle, h...

Grain Market Integration in the Baltic Sea Region in the Nineteenth Century

This article explores the development of market integration within the Baltic Sea region and with England, from the 1840s to the late 1880s. It exploits two new datasets on grain prices. The degree of market integration is estimated using a wavelet variant of dynamic factor analysis that takes account of both time and distance. Additionally, we use the London corn market as the benchmark for the degree of market integration. Our results show that the role of distance disappeared in the wheat and rye, but not in the oats and barley trade, as the Baltic Sea Region became integrated into the Atlantic economy.

Did Higher Technical Education Pay

Despite the general agreement about the importance for economic growth of higher education, and in particular higher technical education, facts that prove or disprove this notion are not easily available. One approach would be to disaggregate national accounts and look at sectoral data for education. However, such data are seldom reported in the official statistics. Moreover, in national accounts, education, like other non-marketed services, suffers from the non-existence of price and output estimates. Labour input — that is, teachers and other personnel — is therefore taken as a proxy for the contribution of education to GDP. In the most recent system for national accounts (SNA 1993, pp. 402–3) other measures are also discussed, but for historical periods national accounts rely solely on input data. For the study of change over time that poses a problem, since current values must be deflated into constant prices. And the labour input is deflated with an index of the relevant earnings which means that the estimated ‘output’ actually equals the quantity of inputs. In other words, nothing is, by definition, left for productivity change. The contribution of the education sector to economic growth thus equals its increase of employment, at the value of labour in the chosen base year. The sources of the part of growth contained in the ‘residual’, that is the total factor productivity, should thus be sought somewhere other than in education.

Structural analysis and the process of economic development: essays in memory of Lennart Schön

Economic development is full of discontinuities. Mainstream economists perceive these as external disturbances to a natural state of equilibrium, but this book argues that much of the discontinuities are part of economic development, suggesting that patterns can be understood with structural analysis.Structural Analysis and the Process of Economic Development presents a detailed analysis of the trajectory of Swedish economic change since the nineteenth century. The emergence of structural analysis in economic research is reviewed, as well as a chapter devoted to development blocks, a key concept that was outlined in the 1940s and that has much in common with the more recent notions ‘techno-economic paradigms’ and ‘general-purpose technologies’. Structural analysis and the major contributions by Schon are introduced in this book. Also highlighted is Sweden’s integration into the international economy via the nineteenth century capital markets, along with structural analysis as a tool for understanding climate change. The recent technique of wavelet analysis and its potential for structural analysis is demonstrated in a non-technical chapter.This book is suitable for those who are interested in and study political economy, economic history and European history. (Less)

When the track does not accord with the map — a critique of Rojas

Abstract Walt W. Rostows stages of economic growth may well be seen as the classical case of a theory that in the end has to be regarded as false but nevertheless had much success. It was argued in a very persuasive manner and provoked the taking-off of a huge research programme in several countries. Although the results of this research were critical for Rostows stages theory, the theory can be seen as the first shot in a sequence of events that substantially enlarged our knowledge of industrialization and economic growth.