Robert Millward

Public Enterprise in the Modern Western World: An Historical Analysis

The aim of this paper is to explain the pattern of public enterprise in Western Europe, Japan and USA in the late 20th century, just before the onset of privatisation. It is argued that this requires an understanding of the origins which date from the early 19th century. The task then becomes one of explaining differences over time and across countries. The focus is on those enterprises levying prices and required to break even financially. A common misconception is that the establishment of such public enterprises at both the state and municipal level was a device for overcoming problems of natural monopoly and/or a socialist instrument for mitigating worker exploitation. It is argued that the former was mainly dealt with by arms’ length regulation and that socialist forces were limited. The key questions that have to be answered and around which the paper is organised are: why was public enterprise common in grid networks; why were state owned enterprises in manufacturing more common in Germany, Spain, Italy; why were USA and UK (up to 1939) different; was municipal and state socialism important; what does the privatisation experience tell us about public enterprise; what do performance studies reveal? The answer is that public enterprise was often an instrument for promoting social and political unification, securing national defence and related strategic considerations, increasingly in the 20th century for promoting economic growth, with regulatory failures and socialist pressures playing a more subsidiary and/or occasional role.

Public health expenditures and mortality in England and Wales, 1870–1914

Attempts to account for the pattern and progress of mortality decline in England and Wales in the nineteenth century have produced a literature in which something of a general accord exists over key factors involved. Historians acknowledge the influence of two broad trends of change: environmental improvements as a result of sanitary reform initiatives and nutritional improvements as a consequence of a rise in the general standard of living. Where discord has arisen is in the degree of attachment of individual historians to one or other of these trends as primary contributor. The study of mortality decline, which was the product of a complex amalgam of factors, has proved a complicated task. It is one whose outcome ultimately depends upon efforts to disaggregate and measure the influences of different factors involved. To date, attempts at the systematic measurement of certain key factors associated with mortality decline have lagged considerably behind acceptance of the importance of their measurement. An important omission has been a measure of the timing and dimensions of sanitary reform programmes which, via infrastructure development and environmental controls, had the potential to decrease the rate at which infectious diseases were transmitted. This article examines the trends which emerge from a quantification of local government expenditures on sanitary infrastructure and from attention to its phasing over time. We are concerned with two main issues: to what extent do public health expenditure data describe the public health effort, and how do trends in public health expenditure relate to the decline of mortality? Our subject is local authority sanitary reform as a factor in mortality decline and our focus is on the impact of the timing of public health expenditure rather than the reasons for that timing. We do not examine inter-relationships between sanitary reform and other factors contributing to mortality decline such as income levels and density factors. A call for a more comprehensive study of the sanitary undertakings of local government has been common amongst historians of nineteenth-century mortality decline. It has been acknowledged on both sides of the ‘nutrition versus sanitation’ debate that a probable causal relationship exists between sanitary reforms and declining mortality levels. What has been lacking is a study of sufficient scale and detail to enable comprehensive evaluation.

From Private to Public Ownership of Gas Undertakings in England and Wales, 1851–1947: Chronology, Incidence and Causes

There are no ready explanations for the shift from private to public ownership of the infrastructure which occurred in many Western countries in the period from about 1850 onwards. This paper presents for the first time, from parliamentary and trade sources, a comprehensive record of the number of gas undertakings in England and Wales, their geographical spread and the incidence of municipal ownership. The experience of some 400 towns are analysed for the period 1851–1939 to ascertain the causes of municipalisation. These are identified as the desire of local authorities to get access to gas company profits in order to relieve local taxes and finance urban improvements, and to control the monopoly position of local suppliers. Municipalisation also involved costs, mainly of an administrative and legal nature. The differential incidence of these costs and benefits can be used to explain the complex pattern of public and private ownership which persisted to the Second World War.

Infant Mortality in Victorian Britain: The Mother as Medium

r he decline in infant mortality in some regions of Europe may have been prolonged. Levels of infant deaths of 200 to 300 per 1,000 births were recorded in France, Sweden, and England in the eighteenth century and by the 1840s they were nearer to 150. This trend was then halted and reversed in those areas experiencing the worst blights of rapid urbanization so that the undisputed long-term decline is, for Britain, commonly put at the beginning of the twentieth century-some 40 years or so after the downturn in overall mortality. Similar turning points have been observed in the southern German states, Austria, and Russia.2 From British evidence, however, it seems that deaths from diarrhoea related diseases may have masked a pre-existing downward trend in other sources of infant mortality. There is evidence of a rise in infant diarrhoea at the very end of the nineteenth century which has been linked to a succession of hot and dry summers and, by at least one writer, to the surge in horse transport, and hence street manure and flies.3 Estimates by Williams and Galley suggest that in rural areas in this period diarrhoea accounted for fewer than five infant deaths per 1,000 births, and work by Lee and by Williams and Mooney has demonstrated that these areas experienced little interruption in the long-term decline in infant mortality.4 Indeed, explanations for the decline in rural infant mortality are difficult to find. Infant deaths from diarrhoea in urban areas have been linked to poor sanitary and other environmental conditions. It seems that there were, on average, about 20 to 30 infant deaths from diarrhoea per 1,000 births in urban areas in the late nineteenth century. Hence, even allowing that this may not have been a precisely defined disease category, there still remained a large number of infant deaths in urban areas which were attributable to other causes. If diarrhoea related deaths are excluded, a clearer long-term downward trend emerges for urban as well as rural areas so that the long-term trend cannot be explained simply as a matter of cleaning up the urban environment. Again, no explanation has been offered in the literature.

Economic factors in the decline of mortality in late nineteenth century Britain

Although mortality in Britain showed a long term decline from as early as the eighteenth century, it stagnated in the nineteenth century under the pressures of urbanisation and industrialisation. This paper examines the economic factors which lay behind the resumption of the mortality decline in Britain 1870–1914. A framework of analysis is developed which distinguishes factors in the physical environment (like population density) which affected mortality directly, from price and income movements which affected decisions about expenditure on sewers, water supplies, food, medical staff. A regression analysis of mortality in a sample of 36 towns in England and Wales suggests increases in the incomes of households and town council tax revenues were instrumental in the decline of mortality. This allowed extra spending not only on food, as McKeown emphasised, but also on a wide range of health-enhancing goods and services. The major improvement in the physical environment was the housing stock which rose faster than the population whilst its quality and dimensions were increasingly regulated by central and local government.

Population and Living Standards 1914-45

Introduction The 1914–45 period was littered with civil wars, famines, economic depression, population displacements, ethnic cleansings, and World Wars, and yet a clear long-term demographic trend can be discerned. The total population of Europe rose from nearly 500 million in 1913 to nearly 600 million by 1950, a result of mortality falling more than fertility. In 1913 there were still very large differences in birth and death rates across Europes regions, with the highest in eastern and southern Europe. Despite massive short-term shocks, the next thirty years were marked by huge overall declines in mortality and fertility and by a considerable narrowing of the differences across countries. One task of this chapter is to explain these developments. A second distinctive feature of the period was the great movements and displacements of population within Europe. The underlying economic force was a large shift from agriculture to industry, matched by the move from villages to towns which is analyzed in a later section. Equally important were political forces linked to the collapse of the three multicultural empires (Ottoman, Russian, Austrian–Hungarian) which, together with the military expansions and contractions of the German Reichs in the two world wars (see Chapter 6 in this volume), led to huge population displacements, ethnic cleansings, and deaths from war, famine, and deportation. What effect did these massive changes have on living standards? Over the whole period, real incomes rose, as did life expectancy, literacy, and education levels.

Inequality, poverty, and history : the Kuznets memorial lectures of the Economic Growth Center, Yale University

Inequality and the industrial revolutionl migration - escaping from rural poverty accumulation and inequality - making the connection policy poverty and industrialization.

Geo-politics versus market structure interventions in Europe's infrastructure industries c. 1830–1939

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the natural monopoly features of infrastructure industries, together with their strategic roles, have been important elements in state intervention. The aim of this paper is to evaluate what relative weight was attached to market failure problems on the one hand and geo-political factors on the other. For the period 1830–1939, how far were geo-political factors stronger than natural monopoly problems in accounting for the scale of intervention in the various countries of the Western World? How far did the policy instruments for security and market failure overlap? Whilst most of the infrastructure sectors are covered – including internal telecommunications, coal, gas, shipping, electricity and water – special attention is devoted to international submarine telegraph tables and railways. The paper concludes by demonstrating strong differences between Britain and USA on the one hand and Continental Europe plus Japan on the other.

Business and government in electricity network integration in Western Europe, c.1900–1950

A cross-country comparison is made of the moves to system integration, at the national level, of electricity supply in several Western European countries. Private electricity business firms were dominant in France, Italy and Spain and large generating enterprises and transporting groups grew through mergers and agreements. In Germany, Scandinavia and the UK, municipalities were more common and were resistant to mergers and network development. Several national networks had emerged by the 1940s but hardly any were nationally managed in the sense of ensuring electricity was everywhere supplied from the lowest cost source. The article considers the economic gains from integration and argues that it developed successfully where central governments became actively involved.

The Family Silver, Business Efficiency and the City

In 1985 the former Conservative Prime Minister of the UK, Harold MacMillan, caused some embarrassment by likening privatisation to a once wealthy family selling the family silver. Actually MacMillan was not opposed to privatisation but rather wanted to air a concern that the proceeds were being treated as government income and in danger of being frittered away on current consumption, rather than invested in new capital. That dimension of privatisation, the inflow of cash to reduce the public sector deficit, was a key element of the early years. But there is little doubt that the Conservative governments thereafter pursued privatisation to boost business efficiency. By the time of the big privatisations of British Telecom and British Gas in 1986/87, the role of competition, regulation and efficiency had become central. The City also appears in the title of this essay because of the role of merchant banks, underwriters and other financial institutions. The sale price of state assets was a central element in the economic and political debates of the 1980s and the City institutions had a leading part in determining what sort of deal the taxpayer received. These are some of the key issues in the recently published Official history of privatisation covering the years 1970–1987. The author is David Parker, the Research Professor in Privatisation and Regulation in the School of Management, Cranfield University. He is not a historian but an economist who has published well known books and articles examining the whole experience of privatisation in Britain and Europe (Crew & Parker, 2006; Parker, 1998). It is an impressive piece of work with sufficient detail and detachment to provide ammunition for both supporters and opponents of privatisation. The exposition is excellent, providing the reader, for example, with simple explanations of City jargon like stagging and underwriters’ clawback. Compared to the other Official Histories with which I am familiar, by Sir Norman Chester (1975) and Terry Gourvish (2006), this volume is equally devoted to providing a full record, has more economics (though readily intelligible), is slightly more academic and, especially when set against Chester’s book on the 1945–1951 nationalisations, there is less emphasis on the parliamentary process. A large number of past and present leading Conservative politicians were interviewed as well as many of the advisers but hardly any trade unionists or Labour Party politicians. Official histories are typically concerned with the formation and delivery of government policy but curiously I could not here find any terms of reference. The focus is clearly on the sale to the private sector of enterprises where the central Business History Vol. 52, No. 1, February 2010, 169–185