Until his untimely death Zvi Griliches was an important contributor to the measurement and interpretation of productivity growth in the United States and elsewhere. Economists working in this area have been principally concerned with trends in two key measures of productivity: labor productivity, or output per hour, and multifactor or total factor productivity (MFP). Growth in labor productivity is the growth in real output less growth in hours, and multifactor productivity growth is the growth in real output less a weighted average of growth of inputs conventionally measured, with the weights corresponding to shares of factors in national income. The former measure is the most important determinant of growth in our material standard of living as measured by growth in per capita real output. The latter variable, subject to some qualifications, gives us some measure of the impact on economic growth of scientific and technical progress in different periods. The two are closely related, since growth in labor productivity can be decomposed into a portion accounted for by capital deepening (rise in the ratio of capital services per labor hour) and the “residual” contributed by growth in MFP.

This article considers whether natural monopoly conditions or AT'T's market power was responsible for the formation of a single, standardized network in the United States telephone industry. It shows that AT&T was able to move the industry towards a single system under its management through a strategy of competition and compromise with competitors. The article also examines the impact of AT's actions on state regulators, concluding that public officials, lacking necessary knowledge and authority to set policy, ended up supporting AT's position in the industry.

An early long-running federal social policy experiment was the preferential hiring of American Indians at agencies, reserations, and shools. This government employment was designed to accelerate the assimilation of the natives and to reduce their resistance to education and economic change. Instead, the program inadvertently created a form of dependency. This ironic outcome was due to the power of the natives to shape the policy according to their needs and values.

The relocation of Europeans across the North Atlantic during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century was the culmination of the longest-lived and most widely documented transoceanic migration of modern times. This enormous population transfer was a great human drama, a major international demographic shift, and a massive historical experiment in cultural transformation during a period of unprecedented globalization. This migration was also a complex and powerful travel business containing both risks and rewards for its three fundamental participants: the movers, the moved, and the sovereign authorities on either side of the borders being traversed. Prior studies have not adequately explained this business nor appreciated the extent to which the various strategies for dealing with its associated risks were crucial, largely congruent, and self-reinforcing elements of the overall migration process.

Economists have reported results based on populations for every country in the world for the past two thousand years. The source, McEvedy and Jones’ Atlas of World Population History, includes many estimates that are little more than guesses and that do not reflect research since 1978. McEvedy and Jones often infer population sizes from their view of a particular economy, making their estimates poor proxies for economic growth. Their rounding means their measurement error is not “classical.” Some economists augment that error by disaggregating regions in unfounded ways. Econometric results that rest on McEvedy and Jones are unreliable.

“… we haven’t just pulled the figures out of the sky. Well, not often.”

—McEvedy and Jones (1978, p. 11)

As the United States became more urbanized in the nineteenth century, local-government expenditures increased as local governments expanded their services in response to their growing populations. Expenditures at all levels of government increased substantially in the nineteenth century, but local governments grew more than either the states or the federal government. Total local-government expenditures increased along with the growing urban population, but expenditures per urban resident also increased substantially. The major expansion in local-government expenditures began in the 1830s. This study examines the period of transition to local-government growth from 1820 to 1870.See Davis and Legler, “Government”; Legler, Sylla, and Wallis, “U.S. City Finances”; and Wallis, government expenditures only back to 1880, 1850, and 1840 respectively. The first two used less comprehensive data than the present note, and Wallis (“American Government Finance”) gives summary data on local expenditures without discussing how they were calculated.

The response of American merchants to the opportunities of neutral trade after 1793 was not limited to expanding the volume of their operations. Semi-annual reports on shipping submitted by American consuls to the Department of State provide a uniquely rich source of evidence about mercantile decisions. Analysis of the evidence from the port of Leghorn, Italy, between 1798 and 1820 reveals the growing productivity of American shipping and the characteristics of America's re-export trade to southern Europe.

Jeffrey Williamson's provocative discussion opens up a range of questions that surely will be of concern to students of industrial growth in the antebellum United States. Three distinct empirical prongs are advanced by his probing critique of my study of the nature and implications of the production function characterizing the manufacture of powerloom cotton cloth.

Students of the Five Year Plans are familiar with the overreach. Sing ambitions, the inflated claims, die disputed accomplishments, die misleading statistics, and the appalling human costs of “socialist industrialization” in Soviet Russia. They have generally ascribed these phenomena to Bolshevik dieory and practice. It comes as a surprise then to find die criticism of die early Five Year Plans foreshadowed, in almost identical terms, in die attacks made upon die earlier policy of rapid industrialization in Russia which is linked with the name of Sergei Witte, the Czarist Minister of Finance, 1891–1903. He, too, paraded seemingly impressive results and dubious figures, and he, too, was forced to exact dire sacrifices from popular welfare: Despite the profound dissimilarities between the Soviet system and die Witte era (they must go unstated here) there exists, it would seem, an underlying continuity, pointing to more fundamental necessities and profounder tragedies that backward countries widi strong nationalist and imperialist tendencies must face in die precipitous development of their resources. One special difference, however, should be noted in diis context. The distaste for die bitter fruits of forced industrialization, muted in Stalinist Russia, could frankly, although not entirely freely, be expressed in die eighteen nineties, when Witte's policies attained their full effect. The subsequent discussion of Witte's policies and their consequence is drawn from that public protest.

This article reviews recent literature on American growth before 1840 and compares it with estimates derived from the Philadelphia region. The estimates indicate that national output per capita rose no less than 0.S to 1.0 percent per annum in the period 1810-1840 and that growth exhibited trend acceleration. Relatively modest growth was accompanied by extensive development, initiated by sharply lowered transport costs. Faced with higher returns for exports and diminished costs for imports, regional producers increasingly specialized. Heightened intraregional trade fostered a pervasive reallocation of resources among sectors and among subsections of the region. This development helped ensure rapid, post-1840 growth.

Urbanization of the United States in the nineteenth century has been described in numerous scholarly texts. As Eric Lampard, writing in 1961, pointed out, “… the urban-industrial transformation [has] now become part of the furniture displayed in every up-to-date textbook of U.S. history.…” Yet, as the same author had pointed out six years earlier, at that time “no systematic study has ever been made of the role of cities in recent [as opposed to medieval] economic development. We are still unable to counter the charge that cities are ‘abnormal’ and ‘costly’ with any account of the ways in which they have actually facilitated, let alone fostered, progressive economic change.” Obviously, since 1955 significant progress has been made towards filling this lacuna.

Wage rate statistics are available for common labor, carpenters, masons, and “teamworkers” for a span of sixty years or more in the nineteenth century in the Erie Canal Papers now on deposit in the New York State Library in Albany. The data are abundant, the documents in which wage reports were made are well preserved, the wage record is for a well defined area and by 1828 the data are un ambiguous.Within three years of the completion of the canal theforeman of repairs had learned to write reports specifying clearly the kind of work each man in his gang performed, to distinguish between wage payments and wage rates, and to record the dates and continuity of employment. Over the fifty-four years covered by our series the operation of the canal did not greatly change, the kinds of work done were not altered from year to year, and this conservatism of the management of the canal had at least one merit from our point of view, it rendered our series homogeneous. Nor did the social environmentin which the wage bargains were determined show much modification; the nascent trade union movement was without perceptible influenceon wages on the canal and, though employment on the canal was a matter of interest to legislators in Albany, public regulation did little to influence the wage determination process.