A common element revealed by comparative history of four Asian countries is a major shift in the momentum of agricultural growth from an extension of cultivation frontiers to an agricultural system that uses land more intensively. Improvements in land infrastructure, such as irrigation and drainage, are identified as preconditions for the development of land-saving farming technology. Public investments in land infrastructure were induced by the higher rates of return to irrigation construction and improvements than to new land opening.

The expansion of staple agriculture into the American West after the Civil War was an important event in the economic history of both the United States and the world. This migration of commercial farmers transformed the world's commodity markets. We would expect to find that these farmers were responding to price signals in a commercial fashion. Curiously, the existing literature has failed to detect a price responsiveness in western expansion. This failure appears to stem from a lack of appreciation of the importance of the spatial distribution of prices in the late nineteenth century. This study shows that when this factor is considered, the expansion of western cultivation clearly is connected to the prevailing local price of wheat.

This paper shows that the best practice of American methods for producing iron in 1890 was slightly better than the methods employed in Great Britain. It argues that the difference in technique was not of sufficient magnitude to have any bearing on Britain's “decline” as an industrial power. Profits in America are shown to be quite large, and it is hypothesized that these profits arose because the Americans did not anticipate the growth in the demand for pig iron.

The hostile and patronizing attitudes of native Americans toward the increasing number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the century raise a number of issues that bear on the history of U.S. immigration policy and on other matters. Utilizing Zellner's SUR technique, a model of settlement patterns of ten immigrant nationalities is estimated, and the appropriate F-statistics are generated to test several of these issues: (1) Did “new” immigrants behave as purposefully as contemporaneous “old” migrants from northwestern Europe? (2) Did they react as did the old migrants to a variety of socioeconomic factors? (3) Were the new migrants more dependent on the cultural support of earlier migrated countrymen? The findings indicate diverse, but purposeful, behavior within both the new and the old migrant groups with few systematic differences between them.

This paper focuses on changes in household balance sheets during the Great Depression as transmission mechanisms which were important in the decline of aggregate demand. Theories of consumer expenditure postulate a link between balance-sheet movements and aggregate demand, and applications of these theories indicate that balance-sheet effects can help explain the severity of this economic contraction. In analyzing the business cycle movements of this period, this paper's approach is Keynesian in character in that it emphasizes demand shifts in particular sectors of the economy; yet it has much in common with the monetarist approach in that it views events in financial markets as critical to our understanding of the Great Depression.

On the basis of published accounts, internal rates of return and present values are computed for capital in general and for particular investors (French shareholders and the British and Egyptian governments) from construction to nationalization of the canal. Terminal values at the nationalization had to be imputed. Rates of return are compared with opportunity costs represented by the return on alternative investments. For capital generally, French shareholders, and the British government, rates of return were 8–9 percent against opportunity costs of 3–4 percent. For the Egyptian government, corresponding figures were 2–5 and 11 percent. American investment would not have been profitable.

Although the total real cost of World War II to the Soviet people has yet to be fully tallied, there can be little doubt that it exceeds that of any other major participant, per capita as well as absolutely. The objective of this paper is to compare and evaluate the real war costs reported by the Soviets with those implied by Soviet pronouncements and those using Soviet national income data. Our purpose is to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.