Michael Kopsidis

• Professor
• Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies

In Bulgaria the share of secondary production in GDP remained constantly low between c. 1870–1910. To explain the country's exceptionally weak growth, we use endogenous and unified growth theory. Gerschenkron and Palairet blame a self‐sufficiency‐oriented peasant economy for rising labour and raw material costs in industry, which destroyed the comp...

Chapter 1 shows a clear trend of population growth from around 1650 to 1914, describing the demographic regime of the 18th century as a high-pressure Malthusian system, though one that harbored changes that paved the way for the later demographic breakthrough. This came with the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, as German quickly moved from the Ma...

Germany’s ‘agricultural revolution‘ can be seen as a forward linkage generated by railroads and the connected expansion of urban-industrial agglomerations. Rapid urbanization during industrialization generated sustained demand pull, especially for high-value added food where family farms had a competitive advantage. Railways cut transport costs sub...

Chapter 4 describes the comprehensive liberal reform programs that were implemented in all German states in the early nineteenth century in response to challenges created by the French Revolution. But these reforms were long in the making. A good example are the agrarian reforms. States such as Prussia that had fostered the rise of a powerful `enli...

This key chapter (and the book´s longest) covers a vast area of historical experience. It begins with a broad survey of the regional distribution of economic and industrial development in Germany during the nineteenth century (Part One). In the following three regional studies on Saxony, the Rhineland-Ruhr region, and Wuerttemberg, the roots of tho...

This chapter discusses several dimensions of Germany´s international economic relationships. After a brief overview of German exports and imports, it focuses on four of these dimensions: 1) German industrial exports as a challenge to Britain´s world leadership; 2) the importance of German tariff protectionism for German economic and political inter...

The combination of dying traditional industries and an emergent modern sector centered on railroads made this a period of contradictions exacerbated by widespread harvest failures, and thus marked by spreading pauperism and considerable social and political turbulence, culminating in the Revolution of 1848-49. Despite the high human costs of this e...

This chapter describes German agricultural development in this period as mainly a demand-driven process. It cites two main forces: rural population growth was the main source of increasing food demand until the early nineteenth century; and export markets on Germany´s external borders represented another. In these markets, powerful integration proc...

Chapter 7 opens with discussion of several changes in government policy which encouraged long-run industrial investment, above all, massive investment in expansion of the railroad network. Railroads´ close sectoral linkages to heavy industry, especially coal-mining, iron-making, and machine-making, induced waves of investment in these key branches,...

The epilogue looks back to the long time-span of development of the German economy that ended in 1914. That was long ago, and we inevitably see that period through the prism of the country´s experience since then. It asks whether there is anything "special" about its development: is there a "German model" of development? It rejects the well-known G...

The chapter sees the emergence of “mixed” or “universal banking” as corporations in the 1850s are reflecting the business model of the larger private banking firms that founded them; but it also considers the extent to which they represented a response to the strong and persistent demands of railroads and heavy industry for finance. To some extent,...

Chapter 15 describes a broad panorama of issues associated with the rapid relative growth of German cities after 1870. Its list begins with the great importance of population migration for city growth, the related problems of housing and spatial segregation, and the development of class-consciousness with its political repercussions (“social questi...

This chapter is centered around the development of the German customs union, the Zollverein. Summarizing the recent literature, it emphasizes the strategic importance of fiscal concerns and geographic location for Prussian success after 1815 in using the customs unions of 1818 and 1834 to serve its own hegemonic interests as well as those of German...

This chapter shows that the estimated trend of per capita aggregate net national product reflected Germany´s full transition to “modern economic growth”. This trend, however, is seen to mask strong cyclical movements of the overall economy which raise questions and problems of interpretations of cyclical patterns (Kondratieff Long Waves as opposed...

The chapter opens with discussion of changes in the law affecting companies with limited liability. It mentions (without elaborating) the importance of the new national Mark currency and national central bank (the Reichsbank) founded in 1875. It devotes most of its attention to the achievements and limitations of the big “mixed” (or “universal”) ba...

The chapter examines the role of labor supply and capital accumulation as determinants of industrial development in this period. It argues that population growth and regional migration were the principal sources of the labor supply in the industrializing regions, but also shows that a marked difference in the development of real wages distinguished...

This chapter draws on recent research into German patent activity during the Wilhelminian period. It shows the importance of the national Patent Law of 1877 as a basic institutional point of departure, which ushered in a succession of waves of innovation starting with mechanical engineering, then moving to chemicals (especially dyestuffs), then pha...

The introduction touches on the key themes that motivate the book. Number one is the transition to modern economic growth which is seen as very gradual, repudiating the concept of a “big spurt”. A regional perspective is another key aspect. Industrialization concentrated in a limited number of regions, in those very same regions that were economica...

Résumé Le cheminement de l'Allemagne vers l'industrialisation, qui dura plusieurs siècles, doit être compris comme une évolution institutionnelle graduelle qui bénéficia des circonstances et fut une réponse aux pénuries de la fin du xviiie siècle. Les tentatives pour lui trouver un deus ex machina unique – qu'il s'agisse de Napoléon, de réformateur...

The centuries-long path to German industrialization must be understood as a gradual institutional evolution in response to new circumstances, new opportunities, and new scarcities. Efforts to identify a single deus ex machina—whether Napoleon, Prussian reformers, or some other exogenous driver—do not lead to convincing results. Gradualism offers a...

An evidence-based time series on agricultural growth prior to 1850 only exists for very few German territories. Except for Saxony, there is no series available for the pre-1815 period. Based on sharecropping contracts from the estate of Anholt, we reconstruct the development of crop production for western Westphalia and the lower Rhineland c. 1740–...

Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, industrialization has been the key to modern economic growth. The fact that modern industry originated in Britain, and spread initially to northwestern Europe and North America, implied a dramatic divergence in living standards between the industrial North (...

We challenge the ‘big-bang’ approach to economic history offered by Acemoglu et al. (2011). The creation story in dispute is the French Revolution and the subsequent French occupation of a very small portion of Germany. We show that the four institutional reforms claimed to have spurred German industrialization have been incorrectly dated. These co...

The study produces new data on the long-term development of vegetable foodstuff output and average labor productivity in Saxon agriculture c. 1660–1850. This territory saw an early development of a large, but spatially dispersed industrial sector and an agrarian reform in 1832. We establish, first, that food demand from the labor force of the non-a...

This contribution deals with agricultural dynamics in late-Imperial Russia. Based upon a comprehensive micro-level data set on annual yields between 1883 and 1913, we provide insight into regional differences of agricultural growth and the development prospects of Russian agriculture before WWI. Making use of the fact that contemporary Russian stat...

Southeast Europe's economic backwardness and very slow industrialization prior to 1945 continues, even in recent research, to be attributed to an unproductive peasant economy and traditional peasant society. However, the radical paradigm shift in the view of peasants as agents of economic growth and of their ability to adjust to modern growth after...

This paper explores the pattern of agricultural productivity across 19th century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the ÒLittle DivergenceÓ between European regions. We argue that access to urban demand was the dominant factor explaining the gradient of agricultural productivity as had been suggested much earlier theoretically by von ThŸ...

Southeast Europe’s countries are often denominated as the ‘first developing nations’. Since the end of the 19th century the question of industrialization dominated public economic debates in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and later on Yugoslavia. However, despite all soaring rhetoric no sustained industrial spurts occurred before 1940. Still today the...

Most questions about the sources of agricultural growth during the ‘first agricultural revolution’ are still debated. For the Prussian province of Westphalia, we estimated a translog production function to determine the contribution of intensification and technical change from 1830 to 1880. Additionally, we present evidence on the impact that neutr...

At the break-down of the socialist regime in East Germany and the introduction of a pluralistic democracy, a market economy and, finally, unification with West Germany the collective farms had to be transformed or to be dissolved. At that time, it had been anticipated by (mostly West German) politicians and agricultural economists alike that collec...

The article presents the most important results of the 2008 IAMO Forum on "Agri-Food Business: Global Challenges - Innovative Solutions" which took place on 25-27 June in Halle (Saale), Germany. 171 participants from more than 20 countries discussed important global developments in the agri-food sector and its economic and political environment. Th...

This article explains the lasting transition crisis of Russian agriculture by applying Hayami & Ruttan's theory of induced innovation. The empirical analysis uses Russian farm data. For various types of farms factor intensities and partial factor productivities are calculated to identify differences in productivity between them. We identify the mec...

Even after more then ten years after the beginning of the transition process, Russian agriculture shows only limited sign of a recovery. Production has not reached the level of the pre-transition period and investment is still on a very low level. In this paper we use the “Theory of Induced Innovation” in order to access the development of pr...

Following the literature agro-food markets in Russia are only poorly integrated. However, many important questions still remain unanswered. Looking at spatial market integration different patterns concerning the relations between deficit and surplus regions depending on the economic performance and foreign commercial activity of a demand area have...

Between 1990 and 1996 the share of interregionally traded grain in the total amount of grain domestically available in the Russian Federation was reduced significantly. Much evidence indicates that the decline of the domestic grain trade has mainly been the result of strict control by regional authorities following their own agricultural market pol...

Russian agricultural production has declined continuously since 1990 except in 1997. Gross Agricultural Output (GAO) in 1998 reached little more than 55% of the initial level of 1990 (own calculation, OECD, 1998, p.49 and OECD, 1999a, p.244). The slowdown was further sustained in 1999 (East Europe, July 1999, p.6). An important reason for the poor...

Regional grain production in the Russian Federation has developed in a number of different ways over the last years. The same is true for grain marketing. Not only the prices on local markets but also those in the nation-wide grain trade seem to be at least strongly influenced by regional authorities. However, it is very likely that only a small pa...

The food industry is one of the most important sectors in the Latvian economy. However, due to its close links to agriculture, the structural crisis in the processing sector is the main obstacle to increasing output, productivity and profitability in the entire agricultural sector. Based on the structure-conduct-performance framework developed by t...

From 1990 to 1994 the economic and political process of disintegration within the Russian Federation halved the domestic trade of grain between the various regions and caused significant reductions in the production. From European economic history and the experience of several developing countries follows that there is a strong correlation between...

The seasonality of weddings molded itself to regionally specific patterns of labor in early-modern England. Advantage can thus be taken of the widely available if unlikely source of parish registers of marriages to reveal the timing of regional specialization, defined narrowly as the ability of regions to forgo the production of the staples of loca...