Economic History - Science topic

In practice, since resources need capital to find and develop them, since technological improvement can be applied to production only via capital investment, since entrepreneurial skills act only through investments, and since an increased labor supply is rela­tively independent of short-run economic considerations, the only viable way to economic growth as rise in living standards is through increased saving and investment. Either more and better resources can be found, or more and better people can be born, or technology is improved, or the capital goods structure is lengthened and capital multiplied. In the Austrian or psychological view of human economic action, what brings about improvement comes not by economic growth or by stability, but through economic transformation that is guided by the freedom of private initiative within an open market system, i.e. instead of its fixation on economic growth and stability, a non-interventionist system would favor the space that is given for the individual to demonstrate and actively pursue his preferences.

The current interventionist approaches , in contrast, put the individual under a modern kind of serfdom where "output" or rather "expenditure" becomes the statistical criteria.

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It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge.

Julian Simon

The first article can be approached with the study of the production function, with respect to the baisic assumption of the authors (different goods///different production functions///historical formation of production pattern).

The second article about cooperative wine production can be approached from the basic insights into cooperative economics in capitalist markets, e.g. the trend to high quality wines, after 1980.

Both articles are case studies, which also needs methodical attention, with respect to the economic historical framework.

Dear @Yoshinori Shiozawa Kindly check the following links, and attached pdfs; hope, these could be important sources of insight to the answer of your question.

I found two additional information on the beginning of one-price system.

One is noted in Werner Sombard's Liebe, Luxus und Kapitalisum.(1922). Sombard notes that it was Au Petit Dunkerque, a bijoux shop, situated at 3 Quai Conti (6e Arr.), Paris. Somard cites a book by Mercier published in 1783. The note appears in number (4) of the short history of silk industry in Section 2, Chapter5. (p.277 in Japanese translation Kodansha Gakujutsu Bonko).

Another information is given by Neil McKendrick in McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb (1982/2018) The Birth of a Counsuemer Society. He writes in page 86:

The Echigoya case of 1683 (See my three posts above) precedes about one century before one-price, no abatement and no credit system seemed to be introduced in Paris and London.

I have co-authored a paper that discusses A&G' s findings. See: V. Daniele, A. Di Ruggiero, The Roots of Global Inequality: The Role of Biogeography and Genetic Diversity, Journal of Development Studies (downloadable in ResearchGate).

See also: Ideen A. Riahi, Why Eurasia? A probe into the origins of global inequalities, Cliometrica.

I should have added in my initial response that instead of a time series approach an equally simple way would be to do a cross sectional analysis. Use data on population growth and per capita income from a variety of countries with differing income levels. Also, if there is some reason not to use regression analysis just setting up the data in a scatter diagram would offer some insight into the relationship.

Hi Charles, I visited Switzerland twice for 1-month and 6-month internships. Nice country. Yeah, Switzerland's industrialization should be a nice research topic, but I wonder about your period of study. Do previous studies consider 1890-1913 as a period of insustrialization in Switzerland? Do you have quarterly or monthly data for running the VAR model? For how many Swiss industries do you have the gross added value? Of course (since Einstein's job in Switzerland), do you have the time series of Swiss patents for that period? By industry or broken by type of patents? Considering the empirical section of your study, (if you only have annual data) I would strongly recomend to add the 40 or 50 years after the period of study because a plain VAR model is not good for small samples of data (a Vector Error Correction -VEC- model should work better for such data, instead). But there is another reason explaining the cold reaction of the reviewers: a VAR model is not quite useful for discovering the industrialization determinants since it is an "atheoretical" statistical model: you may need a "Structural VAR" (aka SVAR model) or better a Structural VEC (SVEC) model. Then you will be able (abstracting from the data frequency I already mentioned) to propose a theoretical structure (meaning, useful research estimated parameters) to discuss following your hypotheses. Those hypotheses should come from the previous section, the core section, which is the "theoretical" section. Such a section should consider at least the hypothesis you can select from reading many studies about economic history of Switzerland BUT also review some growth models, like the classic ones usually reviewed in macroeconomics' textbooks (Solow model, etc.) and other more recent ones like Romer's model (which consider the idea of Research & Development (please remember my idea about patents). For discovering those models, Romer's book for graduate students is the best. Finally, allow me a personal comment: I do like reading about economic history because it is a great companion for macroeconomic economists. It is such a down-to-Earth topic !

The term "sub Saharan Africa" is used to refer to countries on the south of the Africa continent. The Sahara desert acted as a blockade dividing the sub Saharan Africa from North Africa. Also the north has a unique Islamic features because they had contact with the Arab world even before the incursion of Europeans in Africa.

I don't know if you're still researching this topic, but I think that Shiraha in Convenience Story Woman (コンビニ人間) is somewhat hikikomori, although he is in his 30s.

IMF monthly coal (Australia) prices start in 1990. Their data are curated. If you are interested in recent data, you could also look at futures markets which would provide you with high frequency data of, likely, a few years.

The MacroFinance and MacroHistory Lab in Bonn can be of some help with data on exports, imports and IP sin 1870 for 17 countries. You can find it here: http://www.macrohistory.net/data/

Pedro,

I do not see the phenomenas you are describing as simultaneous. The present situation is rooted in the 2008 crisis.

First, economic growth is recent in the US and is a consequence of President Trump policies of lowering taxes and reducing regulation. Before, the US was stuck in a slow recovery.

It is this slow recovery that has forced the fed into a long term zero interest rate policy that is very difficult to get out of and therefore has pushed stock market prices very high.

Inflation has remained subdued because of the US imports from countries with very low wages and the will of previous governments to accept huge external deficits.

So it is an odd combination of several factors that give the appearance of classic economic laws becoming obsolete.

I suspect the pendulum will come back and I would guess that the first sign of it would be an increase of inflation.

I would call it a two-party transaction. However, I think the distinction has to be defined more precisely, because even on security and commodity exchanges there are normally only two parties to any transaction, even if other people are witnesses to it.

Detroit had many factors including the redesign of the factor from vertical to horizontal that contributed. If you want a more comparable city look at Flint, MI which is a more similar size and was decimated when GM pulled out in the last 1970's early 1980's.

I would like to discuss two key phrases of this discussion:

Mehmed Ganic: "Now is it possible to force many" U.S. MNCs to make "(in) economical motivated decisions" and back their business to home ...".

Stephen I. Ternyik: "The personal prices for receiving a good professional education are very high;

 adaptation to new economic conditions has always to do with educational opportunities and models,  i.e. the promotion of talent of the people.

I want to ask: is it possible to "back their business to home" with today's American System of Education. To this question, I decided to give a detailed answer from the famous mathematician Academician Vladimir Arnold from

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TlqQjmTLH4 ("Academician Arnold about American Education").

"The Americans explained to me that they are consciously fighting for what they are doing,  that the people were poorly educated and not interested in science,  no culture, not because it contradicts the consumer society,

because if people start to take an interest in something other than washing machines and cars that need to be bought every week new, then they are the worst buyers. Well, if they buy, they start buying Van Gogh or some verses, or theorems to prove, which is harmful for consumers. To prevent this, and, moreover, that the population be an obedient herd in the hands of politicians manipulating them, it is need to make not European, but American System of Education, in which nothing is taught. For example, in the state of California there was a serious struggle among the intelligentsia, that universities did not accept all peole despite the federal rules.They demanded that in Mathematics, for example, not to take those who do not know how to divide 111 by 3 without a computer. In federal laws there is nothing like this: there are no divisions, there are no simple fractions. The journal of the American Mathematical Society published several years ago such statistics: it turns out that such a task as "to divide the number 3/2 by 1/3" from mathematics teachers in US schools depending on the state in some states 1% of teachers know how to do it, and in some 2%, nowhere else. There are no fractions, there simple fractions are excluded, they are not at all. Therefore, there is no fraction 111/3, no one can do it. In Washington there was a discussion of where the senators spoke. One senator from the state of Nebraska said: "I care about upholding the interests of my constituents.I will achieve that not only in Nebraska but also in the US in general, no one would dare to teach anyone anything that I do not understand , for example, divide 9111 by 3. This is the US senator. In the world there is such a tendency as the destruction of the old system of education. A few years ago, a representative of a very large American firm "Boeing", which is well known to all, explained to me that the American System of Education is such that they can not hire students from US universities to make new planes or even repair old planes. "Boeing" exists only on the fact that they hire emigrants, mainly from three countries: from Russia, China and India. Therefore, when we read in your newspapers that you are going to bring your education system to American standards, we understand that according to our estimates in Russia in 30 years there will be the same bad education system, and then we are no longer able to hire anyone at all. Then the entire technological system will collapse, because it is based on emigrants, it is based on the fact that the minds of the whole Europe work in the United States. "

Thus, Katastroika in the American way, which was mentioned by Stephen I. Ternyik, can most likely happen. The Americans have launched Globalization and are now reaping the rewards: Globalization is destroying Education and Science around the world. Indeed, who will work in "Boeing" after 30 years with the American education system around the world? Even difficult to imagine.

convert data in ppp dollar

Dear Yeray, thank You very much. It is something new for me.

I am not familiar with Verbin.  By any chance, do you mean Veblen as in Thorstein Veblen?

For those interested, I have found some interesting discussions in: Walter Y. Oi , "The Desirability of Price Instability Under Perfect Competition", Econometrica, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan., 1961), pp. 58-64

Dear Mr. Jaudon and Mr. Pizzati

It's a lecturer from Department of Economics in University of AJK Pakistan.

I would like to invite you in the class to give 30-60 Minutes Skype lecture about European History in undergraduate course class of History of Economic Thought.

In response to that we can volunteer for your students in any affordable virtual activity. 

The class will be every Monday to Wednessday at 11am (Pakistan time)

Allow me to endorse the suggestion that you consult the India Office Records at the British Library. The class L/AG (Accountant General) should provide your answer.

Moir, A General Guide to the India Office Records, 1996 will give you a useful indtroduction

But start here;

It is quite interesting that Nathan Weatherdon had no occasion to get acquainted with Sraffa or Lange. He has MA from Laval University. This means these two economists are attracting no interests among professors and students in that university.

As Lall B. Ramrattan put it, Lange was once a highly respected economist by his particular positioning. He was an eminent economists who had many edge-cutting researches in the neoclassical and Keynesian orthodoxy (it was the time of "neoclassical synthesis") but was also a socialist and served for the Polish socialist government after the WW 2. He had a vision of market socialism, which was not accepted in the time of Stalinist regime but became a leading idea during the market oriented socialism after mid 1960's until 1990. As an economic theorist, his main tool of analysis was neoclassical marginalist and equilibrium analysis. When the idea of market socialism faded away, he was almost forgotten by the mainstream economists. this explains why Nathan Weatherdon had no chance to hear about Oscar Lange.

Sraffa's contribution is more enduring and still a key to the fundamental innovation (or paradigm change) of economics. He was not a prolific writer but two works that Walter Oetsch cited were destructive. The first The Laws on Returns paper undermined the whole Marshallian system. The second Production of Commodities by means of Commodities book (less than 100 pages) was also destructive for the neoclassical price theory. However, the followers after him were, in my opinion, not sufficiently destructive nor constructive.

It is true that Sraffa's thin book ignited the famous controversy on capital measurement and capital reverse, but this is in my opinion not the central core of Srffa's criticism against neoclassical theory. Sraffa's standard commodity is famous. It is an interesting interpretation of what Ricardo wanted to get in pursue of invariable measure of value, but it has many weak points as Morishima criticized. When technology changes, we should not expect to get such an invariable measure.

The core of Sraffa's criticism is the neoclassical price theory itself. We can now know his lonely theoretical struggle by papers such as Gehrke and Kurz (2006) and Kurz(2012).

Gehrke and Kurz (2006) Sraffa on von Bortkiewicz: Reconstructing the Classical Theory of Value and Distribution

Kurz (2012) Two Critics of Marginalist Theory: Piero Sraffa and John Maynard Keynes

I have posted some comments on both of them.

The mains contradiction between neoclassical economics and classical theory of value is closely related to the law of demand and supply. This law existed before Adam Smith. It is a kind of common people's spontaneous science. Marshall and some others including German Karl Heinrich Rau before him reformulated this law as a cross chart of demand and supply functions. Demand was always understood as the want of goods that have their own utility. This is also an old tradition before the arrival of neoclassical era.

Smith introduced a value theory (although it was quite ambiguous) and Ricardo reformulated it into much more logically refined theory. Their contention was that prices or values are determined by production conditions and demand plays minor fluctuating role. Ricardo was a giant step but soon after his death, the old tradition replaced his theory and returned to the old law of demand and supply.

We can detect many factors that compelled this movement. One of most imporatnt event was John Stuart Mill's examination of intrernational value problem. John Mill had no intension to break down Ricardo's heritage but by an unfortunate circumstances he was led to abandon Ricardo's cost-of-production theory of value and revert to old law of demand and supply. This reversion paved a way to neoclasscial economics. Fora the details of this story, please read my draft paper

Mill's Reversion and an Origin of Neoclassical Revolution

For a further discussion on the nature of neoclassical revolution (in fact it was a counter-revolution to the Ricardian revolution), please see my question page

How do you characterize and estimate the marginal revolution in economics?

Thank you Dragos! I will read it. A quick look tells me how a simple combinatorial game may be used to run an economic experiment. Actually, it seems nice in its simplicity.

You're welcome. Just mention that you book that you think is written in the Greek language is actually written in Greek and in English. Two language is. The book I had in my hands. I used it for one of my research.

From my point of view, it depends on the character of deviation. You can distinguish between (1) resistance with regard to economic policy measures, e.g. the violation of rules that were established to direct the war economy, and (2) political resistance, e.g. resistance against the war effort in general. For the first case, there are several examples in business history that show that there were no or only few consequences since the regime needed managers, engineers and other experts in the war economy (see e.g. Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner (2006): The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry, in: The Journal of Economic History, 66(2), pp. 390-416). But this argument did not hold for the case of political resistance (see e.g. the case of Fritz Thyssen, who was persecuted after he revealed resistance against the war plans).

There are a few in Greece, nineteenth and early twentieth century mainly. In Aegion (Northern Peloponnese) the warehouses connected to raisin export, and in Eastern Macedonia the tobacco warehouses of Drama, Kavala and Xanthi. Worth a look I think. 

Thanks every one...

In social sciences, each field is filled with ill-defined concepts and terminology that is inconsistently used and leads toward different starting positions. In short,  In many publications you will find different definitions, while 'new' is a very tricky word. Think of 'new media' 'or new technologies'.

Economic history is, I think, easy to define, since it refers to a systematic, study of economic phenomena in the past. Since it is a scientific endeavor, it uses several methods to warrant  objectivity, validity, and reliability.

New economy, however, reflects different meanings,depending on the angle.

New economy, from an more humanistic approach, refers to the predominance of human values and sustainability instead of mere economic growth.  lf the approach is oriented toward production  then shift from a manufactory-based  toward a service-driven economy is used. And, if te term is used to make distinction in the scientific approach, new economic history refers to more formal or mathematical research methodologies. 

Robin Edward Jarvis raises at once so points of discussion that are all important, I cannot follow him promptly. I want to answer to his second post (post number 7). In his third post (post number 10), he makes a point that economics cannot and should not go without ethics. He is fundamentally right, but I am not prepared to discuss this question yet and do not enter to this question in this question page. Mohammad Israr Khan posed a question: How do the economists define self-interest and rationality?

In order to answer to his question in depth, I believe we cannot go without asking the elation between economics and ethics. I only started to learn one or two basic books to consider on this question. I will try to challenge answering in the near future (I hope). 

Another fascinating wonderful question, totally new to me, was raised by Carlos Eduardo Maldonado (post number 1) and Robin Edward Jarvis (post number 3, at the end of his post) mentioned on it:

I will come back to this question after I will have discussed Robins’ two points. 

Robin Edward Jarvis (post number 7) raises many points here also, but I want to discuss following two points in the coming two posts :

As far as Britain is concerned I recommend Kemp's book on the industrial revolution.

The British industrial revolution relied on huge supplies of labour displaced from the 'enclosure' of previously common lands by the landed aristocracy.  'Common' lands had previously been widely used by both landless labourers and the few peasants that Britain still had in the 18th Century to rear cattle and therefore survive.  When the artistocrats simply decided that this land could be 'enclosed' so that only they could use it, they created poverty and at the same time a new and quite large social group that could be used in the new factories.  It was cheap labour because it was desperate.

During my field research in Mindanao, in the Southern Philippines, I've heard several accounts of Muslim rebels/revolutionaries of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) that levied what some referred to as zakat on small-scale gold mining proceeds. While I am not sure about these specific cases, this type of rent extraction often occurs in kind i.e. as a percentage of total income. No hard evidence though...

I cannot answer your question. But I can still say that the data from Buck should be used cautiously. They do give a relative picture of rural China in the 1920s and 1930s, but they have a lot of inconsistencies. I don't think it would give very reliable data to computerize them for biomass analysis in the Republican period. At lesat, they should be completed by data collected by Japanese scholars since the 1890s. Hope that helps.

I always admired the work of Francois Quesnay (Tableau Economique). It is an early (18th C / 1758) precursor to input output analysis. It is also connected to the modern work of Walter Isard (inter-regional input output models) and to the classical economics / Marx inspired "production of commodities in terms of commodities." (Sraffa). Modern economic geographers (Michael Webber and David Rigby) have also explored the theoretical connections. [The Golden Age Illusion: Rethinking Postwar Capitalism by Michael J. Webber; David L. Rigby]. Surely another ill-fated example is the attempt at Soviet style central planning -- notorious for making too many of the wrong items, due to lack of market driven price signals. So we come back to the market and big data efforts of retailers like Walmart who have long explored patterns with terabytes of data.

Until your nice question / comment I had not really joined these ideas to connect to big data, but you are correct -- there is a nice lineage. At least I think so!

Dear Pablo

I found the following of use in my understanding of ethnoconomics

Regards

John

Misses and Hayek were battling against the socialists such as H. Dickinson, O. Lange, and F. Taylor on the “economic calculation debate.” Keynes was not on either side. He did not subscribe to the Austrian view, nor was he a socialist.

Although Keynes postulate a role for the government in crises situation, he did not accept the central planning or management view of the socialists. He will go so far as to speak of the “socialization of investment…But beyond this no obvious case is made out for a system of State Socialism”. (General Theory (GT) p. 378).

I think Keynes could have chimed into the debate at the point where the debate focused on information. Government must have information in order to help steer the economy towards full employment. Keynes was hesitant to use probability theory in the GT, although he wrote the famous “Treatise on Probability”. In a fuzzy way, this idea can be put into the same set of thought of Hayek, namely that information cannot be organized as it resides in the brain cells where it is inaccessible to the hands of the planners or policy makers. So both of them have a Fuzzy set of information, one that economic ideas is non-ergodic, and the other that information is only subjectively accessible. Now, the Fuzzy set has picked up another uncertainty element regarding how agents partition information differently.

Keynes was arguing with the Austrians on other matters. His debate with Hayek on monetary matters is well known, starting with Hayek’s review of Keynes’s “Treatise on Money”. Hayek however, did not pay as much attention to Keynes” “General Theory”, dismissing as an inadequate piece on employment.

Dear Tudor, Ciumara,

I think you will find that fiscal policies vary with political ideologies. In the United States the Democrats are in favor of fiscal stimulus (government spending) as they have done in the current recession. The Republicans, on the other side, will hold on to some supply-side policies, where lower taxes will increase supply to the extent that tax revenue will increase (Laffer curve). The current textbook position is that a cut in the tax rate will affect both aggregate demand (AD) and aggregate supply (AS). Lower tax increases the incentive to work, creating more output, but some say that such incentive is small relative to the shift in demand that will occur.

For a recent article, I recommend the entry on fiscal policy in Thomas Cate edited, “An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics, second edition, Edward Elgar, 2013, pp. 190-194.

One must understand it clearly that in fact rate of interest and the marginal efficiency of capital have an opposite individual existence. Rate of interest does not takes care about the production activity and the profits and losses incurred, while MEC wholly depends upon the production and productivity. SO for me interest rate is the wildest form of exploitation used with great tactics, it is a vice almost sharing great responsibility in creating the large divide between rich and the poor.

I,m interested.

Thank you very much for your answers. Yes, I am working with Comtrade to calculate unit values and checking consistency with shorter time series I was able to find from UNCTAD and CEPII.

You can find what your are looking for here:

Fine Henry! Now I think we agree. I never said that welfare effects are enough to study the effects of the enclosures. They are crucial however.

All these events were significant. Even before World War II it was noted that competition in this area does not result in anything good (currency wars). Bretton Woods system also had its own weaknesses (periods of suspended convertibility) ... Europe sought to rebuild after the war so monetary collaboration was essential for this reason as well...

As far as I remember Ch. Higham suggested that the rolers could hardly be used for textile printing because their shape is not well fitted for this. I understood that some experiments have been done and the rollers would have to be covered by the pigment too often to be effective. They could be thus used rather for imprints in clay, but I'm not sure if any prove of such use have been found yet.

I don't think you can draw a line between the two. For early modern naturalists, every curiosity was potentially a commodity and vice versa. Also, curiosities could appeal to a different group of collectors from commodities. Wealthy scholars and collectors of curiosities had different interests from the merchants who sought commodities, but it should also be pointed out that the in early modern period, the most sought after commodities were ones already familiar to Europeans. They sought first and foremost in the New World, after precious metals, valuable commodities already obtained from Asia. The big draw was tropical climate zones where they could expect to find or be able to cultivate commodities such as spices, aloes and, especially sugar. So for every new commodity they discovered, such as tobacco, "old" commodities that could be found (cod fish from the Grand Banks, lumber for European ships from Canada and New England, beaver pelts from the same regions) or produced (sugar), allowed Europeans to obtain more cheaply goods that were more expensive when obtained from Asia or, as in the case of beaver pelts, from Russia. Curiosities were of interest as well, but that interest was fairly superficial except amongst naturalists and wealthy amateur collectors unless the curiosity could become a commodity.

I think it's a matter of principle of conservation of resources. Just as matter or energy, money is not created or destroyed. It has to be generated somehow and it does not disappear without convincing explanations.

The best text I have ever read on the subject of international economic crises was written by Lyndon Larouche, repeatedly candidate for president of the United States and several times he was third.

He is a controversial figure. His texts can be found in the Schiller Institute (www.schillerinstitute.com) site.

Bonnie

Cameron, Rondo and Larry Neal, A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003. This is has been my favourite, with different complements. The same for Maddison. (Maddison, Angus: (2002) La Economía Mundial: una perspectiva milenaria, Ediciones Mundi-Prensa. Madrid.)

You may also have a look at Comín Comín, Francisco [2011], Historia económica Mundial. De los orígenes a la actualidad (Madrid, Alianza Editorial), for spanish-language students. (More concise is (my favourite) Comín, Francisco, Mauro Hernández y E.Llopis (eds.) (2005), Historia Económica Mundial, siglos X-XX, Barcelona, Crítica)

Don´t forget Eichengreen, B (1996); Globalizing Capital (Princeton University Press) (2nd edition 2008) as a complement

If you have time, you can go to eh,net: http://www.thebhc.org/resources/syllabi.html for ideas!

Well, the question is, how I can give a proper definition for "one part of the economy" ... and that means definition of the total economy which can be "cut into pieces" by a defined scale - in its physical presence ... not in a given monetary unit ...

I mean, if you have a rural economy ... all products can be defined as some kind of food (as a very easy example) ... and therefore can be measured by ... maybe its caloric content ...

The same question in principle I am asking for economics.

We live by 100% in a real world. Economy does play in a real world. Therefore there must be a physical expression in different dimensions and characteristics.

The question is: What should we use as the core of economic doing?

And you gave the normally given answer: "Men act." ...

I would say: "Doing work." ... which is the physical description of acting.

But this also stretches out to machine work, controlled by humans.

Doing work is everything.

That is the core of economic doing.

That is the unit to be used as the lowest common numéraire.

It is an absolute value - in the opposit of money, which is always relative.

Oh, thanks! The Social Lives of Forests book is strongest for the tropics. Greg Zaro, at the University of Maine (Dept. Anthropology) is now working on the historical ecology of Croatia, so it might be worth contacting him for some leads to the literature. Good luck with your project!

The Kuznets part always was hihgly controversial. All textbooks on Development discuss this. The Solow part needs adding aspects of globalization. Kaldor has contributed many important aspects but no framework integrating them: endogenous growth, scale economies, externalities, accelerator investment functions.