What accounts for the differences in the economic performance across Italian regions in the post-Unification period? This thesis seeks to explain the regional patterns of economic development and industrialization in Italy in the period 1871-1911 by applying various Economic Geography models. The first part follows Overman and Puga (2002) and studies the distribution of industrial employment across regions. The aim is to test the effect of regional borders on the distribution of industrial employment. The existence of this border effect, tested through the use of provincial data, suggests that the Italian regions in this period represented meaningful economic entities. By testing the effect of pre-1861 borders we link this result to the persistence of pre-Unification institutional arrangements. The second part follows the methodology by Head and Mayer (2011) and investigates the relationship between economic performance and market access. Here market access is captured through market potential, a measure of the centrality of a region based on GDP and transport costs. The main result is that domestic market potential is a strong determinant of GDP per capita while all the formulations of market potential that include trading partners give more mixed results. The last part seeks to explain the location of industries in Italy in the period 1871–1911. The analytical framework takes into account both the Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) theory on factor endowment and the New Economic Geography (NEG) theory on access to markets. The methodology used here is based on Midelfart-Knarvik et al. (2000). The location of industries, measured through employment per region per sector, is explained with interactions between characteristics of the regions and characteristics of the sectors, of both H-O and NEG-type. The main findings of this chapter are that endowments, and in particular human capital, were the driving force behind the first Italian industrialization while access to markets had a more limited effect.

This dissertation examines the extent to which proximity to markets - as measured by market potential, the trade cost-weighted sum of surrounding regions’ GDP - can explain late-nineteenth century Europe’s regional per capita income differentials. The research questions are: (1) was the spatial distribution of regional income random; (2) how helpful are traditional explanations - coal and institutions - of regional income; (3) how helpful is market potential when controlling for traditional explanations; and (4) did market potential have an effect on other determinants of income? This dissertation finds that: (1) the distribution of regional per capita income increasingly concentrated in the northwest; that there was little tendency to income convergence; and regional inequalities were higher within than between countries; (2) while a measure of regional institutions is correlated with income, simple distance-to-coal and a cost-to-coal measures are not; (3) market potential has a significant effect on income; foreign market potential more so than domestic; and increasing core relative to peripheral market potential results in perpherial income losses; and (4) changes in literacy rates, a proxy for human capital, responded to changes in market potential. In conclusion, a new economic geography framework with market potential at its core fits the historical experience well. Certain regions performed better than others generally because they had cheaper access to markets. At the start of the period, trade costs were high, and so economic activity - long concentrated in Britain - was spread out more or less evenly across the Continent. By the end of the period, when trade costs dropped dramatically, economic activity concentrated in the northwest of Europe at the cost of the periphery.

The paradox of China’s failure to industrialize despite its thriving commercialization before the 19th century has been debated intensively, especially in terms of whether market efficiency is sufficient for industrialization in the pre-modern period. This thesis sheds light on this question using archival data on grain prices covering Qing China’s most prosperous episode (1740-1820) to identify the determinants of market evolution as well as the true extent of market integration. My results suggest that China’s market efficiency on the eve of Western industrialization has been grossly overstated, and further imply that China’s market was heavily influenced by its bureaucratic structure. My analysis is based on a historical dataset of monthly grain prices (rice, wheat) in 211 prefectures across China and I match these with new data on the physical geography of the postal and river network and physiographic distribution. My analysis first confirms the close relationship between market integration and geographic proximity but shows that geographical influence is dominated by provincial boundaries. I then employ novel panel time series methods to account for the impact of local and global shocks and to investigate the evolving process of market integration over time. This analysis indicates that China experienced continuous market disintegration with fragmentation driven by political structure. These results support my hypothesis that Qing China’s political system was not conducive to the development of the market mechanism since its primary concern was market regulation rather than revenue.

While confronting the question of aid effectiveness, an important issue (but often ignored) in the context of a developing country like Uganda is which GDP measure would be most reliable as this is crucial for measuring the macroeconomic impact of aid. The most commonly used GDP measure in the aid-growth literature is typically from World Development Indicators (WDI) or Penn World Tables (PWT) (being considered the most reliable or the easiest to obtain). However, disparities in GDP from alternative sources are common and in practice one has different estimates of the level, change and growth of GDP for the same country over the same period. This is of a particular concern especially in developing countries (without exception) where the informal and subsistence sectors are a large share of the economy (Jerven, 2010) and where not all transactions in the formal sector are recorded (MacGaffey, 1991), and the quality of data is still very poor and measurement perceptions of macroeconomic aggregates are varied and weak (Mukherjee, White and Wuyts, 1998). Because the source chosen for GDP may affect inferences on growth and economic performance for African countries, the thesis entry point was an analysis of alternative sources of GDP, and aimed to construct a consistent GDP series for Uganda. The extent of discrepancy in GDP estimates was investigated, and the year on year percentage GDP growth rates, including percentage and average growth rate discrepancies were derived, with a particular focus on sub-periods when GDP from alternative sources diverge most. Although UBOS and WDI real UGX GDP year on year growth rate estimates had a 3.6 percentage point average absolute discrepancy per year, they are consistent, similar and cointegrated. In fact, over 1970-76 and 2000-08 the two series are very close, and they are quite close for 1978-83 and 1993-99. Therefore, either series can be considered to represent trends in the size of the macroeconomy. However, the UBOS real series is smoother and produces a more stable measure of GDP than does the WDI series and it is the underlying source from which macroeconomic data is sought by the international agencies, including WDI. Given this, the less volatile UBOS real series (real UGX GDP/U) was preferred especially as there was less need to incorporate dummies in the rest of the thesis. Fiscal data and private consumption (our preferred measure of growth) in the thesis were derived from this same source. Two dynamics relationships, i.e. one between foreign aid and domestic fiscal variables, and the other between foreign aid, domestic fiscal variables, exports and private consumption in Uganda are assessed using annual data over the period 1972 to 2008. ACVAR model is employed and executed using CATS in RATS, version 2.1and E-views 7.2. Features of the data over 1972-79, a period characterized by political and economic instability in Uganda and the effect of policy shift due to structural adjustment programme and the Museveni regime in Uganda are reflected in the analysis. Considering first the core fiscal variables, we find that aid and fiscal variables form a long-run stationary relation and the role of structural changes remain unclear as the policy shift dummy seems unimportant for the long-run fiscal relation. A test of structural links between aid and fiscal variables reveals that aid is a significant element of long-run fiscal equilibrium, and the hypothesis of aid exogeneity is not statistically supported. In the long-run, aid is associated with increased tax effort, reduced domestic borrowing and increased public spending, although aid additionality/illusion hypothesis remains inconclusive given the nature of the DAC measure of aid used here. A decomposition of the common trends shows that shocks to tax revenue are the pulling forces, while empirical shocks to domestic borrowing, government spending and aid are the pushing forces of the fiscal system. In terms of policy, it is crucial for the donors to increase the reliability and predictability of aid in order for Uganda to improve fiscal planning and reduce the need to resort to costly domestic borrowing. In addition, one way to make inference on the relationship between aid and spending more clear is for donors to coordinate aid delivery systems and also make aid more transparent. Finally, we extended the fiscal analysis and also considered how aid, mediated by the fiscal variables, and exports impact on the growth of the private sector- a relationship a kin to the growth response to aid in Uganda. Results show that aid and the Ugandan macrovariables are significantly cointegrated, and a battery of sensitivity and robust checks demonstrate that the cointegration rank is 2. These are formally identified as representing respectively the statistical analogue of the budgetary equilibrium among the core fiscal variables and the link between aid, fiscal variables, exports and growth in private consumption. Using this rank condition, the hypotheses of long-run exclusion of aid and aid exogeneity are optimally tested within a system of equations, but these are not statistically supported. With particular reference to the growth relation, we find broad support that aid has had, in the long-run, a positive impact on the private sector, albeit indirectly through public spending, and deficit financing is associated with ‘crowd in’ effect linked to public investment spending. However, the belief that ‘earmarking’ aid to investment spending contributes to achieving target growth rates may be exaggerated. It is the productivity, not the level of investment that matter. On the contrary, aid may have an important role in supporting consumption spending, and this happens to be more beneficial to growth in Uganda than may be commonly acknowledged. The role of structural changes remains unclear as the policy shift dummy seems unimportant for the long-run fiscal and growth relations, but may matter for the short-run.

The transition of U.S. economy, from a large primary products exporter based on abundant endowments of natural resources to a leading industrial producer and a successful manufacturing exporter from the late 19th century to the early twentieth century, is a remarkable historical event. In this thesis I investigate the quantitative importance of various factors and policies behind the development of the U.S. and the North Atlantic economy from 1870 to 1913. The factors considered are exogenous changes in : sectoral productivities; endowments in labour and land; and trade costs. While these may not be all the factors that mattered, they were certainly important forces behind the development of the region. I then ask some historically interesting counterfactual questions which are closely related to these forces. First, I explore the implications of the high tariffs imposed on U.S. manufacturing imports. More particularly, I ask "Could U.S. manufacturing and its economy grow as it did without the tariffs?" The second counterfactual exercise is related to the mass migration. There is no doubt that the mass immigration to the U.S. in the nineteenth century contributed considerably to its overall economic growth. But what is uncertain is its quantitative implications on the overall and the sectoral development. I also look at its implications on the Anglo-American real wage convergence. The focus is on several dimensions of the development : the large increase in U.S. share of world manufacturing output and the decline in that of Britain; the growth of their primary and manufacturing output and real GDP; and its structural transformation. In order to disentangle the effects of each force, I build a model of the North Atlantic economy calibrated to be consistent with some key facts during this period.

In Kenya, like in many other countries around the world, private equity’s emergence as a creative method for financing companies, is attracting attention as the government seeks new ways of financing its private sector – which it now recognises as the engine for Kenya’s economic development. This policy outlook is undermined by the reality of a yet extensively undercapitalised private sector, and the lack of a coherent body of knowledge and experience on Kenyan private equity. This study, for the first time, brings together that dispersed body of knowledge to facilitate coherent analysis of the emerging legal and institutional issues that private equity introduces. Using case law and statutory analysis, documentary reviews, interviews and surveys to construct the complete picture of Kenyan private equity, this empirical legal inquiry finds that the law on private equity in Kenya is incomplete: it is patchy and dispersed, and is not uniformly applied among and across all private equity market intermediaries. Secondly, the institutions charged with supervising the implementation of the law are undercapacitated, with the result that regulatory supervision within the private equity industry remains weak and largely unfelt. Thirdly, the legal institutions supporting private equity practice in Kenya (security of property rights, security of financial contracts and integrity in financial reporting) are in a nascent state of development. Fourthly, there is no clear policy on alternative investments generally, and private equity particularly, in Kenya, undermining precision in regulatory objectives. These realities combine to blunt the impact of private equity in driving creative entrepreneurship. These realities support the need for structured national capacity enhancement across all spheres of private equity practice, such as would strengthen regulatory supervision, the emergence of a ‘home brand’ to private equity, the increased visibility of structured government engagement in channelling private equity into economically productive sectors linked to the nation’s development strategy. These findings mirror earlier research investigating the under-performance of private equity in emerging markets, with the upshot that a Law and Institutional Growth Model for Private Equity in Kenya is the necessary catalyst that will trigger the rapid expansion of the Kenyan private equity industry in aid of national development.

This thesis explores the macro-economic history of Cyprus and Malta in the inter-war period. It constructs the first detailed estimates of output at aggregate and sector levels, enabling the analysis of economic growth and the sector structure of the islands‟ economies. It evaluates their performance within the context of economic change on Europe‟s South Eastern periphery and, specifically, in light of the experience of British colonial rule. The thesis argues, first, that economic growth was slow in wider European comparison and as sluggish as in neighbouring countries. It was so despite the two islands' being far less exposed to the political upheavals of the First World War than most other economies in South Eastern Europe. Second, the proximate reasons for their comparatively weak growth performance differed: Cyprus experienced a prolonged agricultural crisis, but participated in the post-depression recovery through the growth in international demand for the output of its copper mining industry. Malta‟s growth was slower than Cyprus due to the combination of declining British military expenditure and the population increasing faster than previously. These differences notwithstanding, the islands were ultimately affected by common problems. Their small overall size had a negative effect on their performance as global protectionism increased and restricted export opportunities. In addition, the colonial governments remained committed to balanced budgets and non-intervention in the economy, limiting their ability to combat the effects of the great depression. As a result, the deteriorating economic situation increased the political tension between the islanders and the colonial governments. The reluctance to mount an effective policy response to the great depression acted as a catalyst to political polarization, leading to violence and the suspension of the islands‟ constitutions.

The purpose of this study was to: Examine the potential for employment growth and output in the informal sector in the Central Region of Ghana; and to: outline a strategy for the development of the enterprises in the sector in the region; and to discuss the implications of the strategy for the Regional Planning Organization and the implementation of a growth centre strategy in the region. The study was limited to the informal sector industrial or artisanal activities, and the petty trading (and services) enterprises in nine selected centres in the region. The main source of data for the study was a field survey carried out by the author in the central region. A review of the literature of studies of the informal sector and their conclusions and the objectives of this study guided the setting up of research hypotheses for this study. These hypotheses were related to : The capacity of the enterprises in the sector for both short and long term employment generation; The relationship between the size range of centres and employment growth in the informal sector enterprises; linkages between the informal sector enterprises and other sectors of the economy; and Constraints facing the enterprises in the sector. The potential for employment generation in the enterprises was 'measured' in terms of the size of the initial and present employment in each enterprise; their work cycle and turnover. It also included a discussion of the perceptions of the entrepreneurs of the past performances of their enterprises and their likely future growth patterns. Employment and output in the enterprises were found to be influenced by a complex combination of factors some of which cannot be quantified in any form. It appeared that constraints to the activities of the enterprises had a substantial influence on the entrepreneurs' decisions with respect to output and size of labour force in their enterprises at the present time and in the future. Solutions to these problems required proposals for a planning strategy for the informal sector enterprises in the central region. This strategy envisaged a combination of economic policy and physical planning approaches. Proposals were made for implementing these proposals. They have implications for the Central Regional Planning Organization and the growth centre strategy they have adopted as a strategy for regional development.

In recent years there has been a concerted effort by feminist historians to retrieve women from historical obscurity and reinsert them into the historical landscape. Early research concentrated on this task of reclamation and produced a number of self-contained monographs and studies of women's lives. However, the emphasis has shifted towards viewing the sexual divison of labour as a central object of study and as a tool of analysis and evaluating its impact on the historical process. It is argued that in this way feminist history can transform our knowledge of the past and contribute to a greater understanding of the process of historical change. The present study seeks to contribute to this project by examining the lives of working women in Scotland between 1850 and 1914. It takes issue with standard accounts which assume that women's paid labour and women's organisation at the point of production will take male forms and argues that gender ideologies had a significant impact on women's experience of work. The pattern of women's employment 1S examined and it is illustrated that because work has been defined according to the male norm of full-time permanent work, outside the home, the extent of women's paid labour has been seriously underestimated. It is also argued that in order to account for the characteristics of female employment it is necessary to take ideological factors into consideration and that notions of what constitutes women's 'proper' role in society had a pattern of women's employment. important role played by trade powerful influence on the The study identifies the unions in maintaining occupational segregation and confirming women's work as unskilled and low paid. It is also suggested that the model of labour organisations was influenced inter-alia by an ideology of gender which limited its ability to relate to the experience of women workers. It is argued that women's experience of work was mediated by their subordination as a gender and that this generated particular forms of resistance and organisation which did not necessarily conform to the standard male forms. The study concludes that we have to reappraise the received view of women workers as apathetic and difficult to organise and suggests that alternative forms of labour organisations which do not reflect but challenge gender divisions are required.

The study treats Latin American countries as one regional economy by aggregating data of individual countries. Principles of aggregating data of individual countries for different types of variables are laid out and the generated data is laid out in terms of an accounting framework. Data series are also projected up to 2000 to provide a long track of 29 years for simulations which follow later. Original econometric work consists in estimating equations for export volume and prices, which is very much in the tradition of global modelling, and modelling aggregate investment for the region. A prototype full macro model is assembled for the Latin American region by using own work and also adopting econometric contributions from others. First, partial model simulations are performed to understand the underlying structural features. Aggregate demand block is simulated to reveal the size, plausibility and time pattern of Keynesian multipliers. This reveals a multiplier of 1.6 and a 11 year cycle generated by the multiplier-accelerator process. Aggregate supply bloc is simulated to exhibit the nature of supply response which shows that supply elasticity with respect to real exchange rate is about .2 and it is unkeynesian in the sense that there is little scope for action by inflationary surprises. Trade bloc is simulated to check whether Marshall-Lerner conditions are satisfied. Current account balance does improve upon devaluation with an elasticity of 2, but once prices and output are endogenized very soon the improvements are lost. Then, full model simulations are conducted in open loop mode to study the response of the regional economy to both external and internal shocks. These simulations show sensible and stable outcomes. Finally the Latin American model is simulated in `closed loop mode' to illustrate the use of the model built for policy analysis. Fiscal and exchange rate policy choices in the face of a negative external shock are investigated. The policy seeks to correct external imbalance. A qualified conclusion is drawn that expenditure cutting works as desired but exchange rate policy sets up severe cycle in current account balance.