Research Korner

Topic: Strategic Marketing In any business, strategic marketing plays a vital role in increasing the possibility of success.  This can be a tough job for any company that really requires an excellent business strategy of putting marketing efforts to promote the company’s products and services to various clients.  And, incorporated in this marketing plan are the vision and   mission and goals of the company.   The real intention must be a clear idea to the target market.  In this manner, you would be able to promote your business and attract customers effectively.  (www.ehow.com) It is very important in developing a marketing plan to have a situational analysis in the business environment.  You need to observe the entire industry through getting track of the new trends that might be applicable to your own business.   Keeping an eye at your competitors make you update of what they do offer to clients in the industry.  For sure, you would not want to be left behind when it comes to business strategy. In this stage, you get the chance to know more about the flow of the competitors’ business and the possible threats that you probably encounter.  The most important thing is you will get to know numerous business opportunities that will help in boosting your own company.  A target plan is very essential in any business.  In this stage, you are planning and conceptualizing the exact business goals that you would like to come up with.  This must include the dynamics that may lead to the success of the company. Your goals can be designed to focus on how to increase company sales, to increase the awareness among the clients about a product or service through launching or relaunching it and to keep your loyal customers with you through giving them incentive programs. After creating your marketing plan, it’s time for you to implement them into action.  In this stage, you are doing the marketing tactics primarily to create a message to the clients or possible clients. Now, you have to use your financial resources to implement your marketing plans. A well prepared marketing budget and an organized group of people is what you need in order to accomplish your marketing tactics.  This is a very vital stage in the strategic marketing because this is the time that you are building and increasing brand awareness among the clients. A well focused marketing tactics that aligned with your strategic company vision and goals will surely boost profits and growth of your business. In making marketing tactics, there are important points to remember in order to come up with a successful marketing and communication plan.  It should support the goals of the business, and it may appear clearly in the promotional campaign.  For instance, the company plans to increase the awareness of potential customers for their new launched shampoo for women.   The price and promotional campaign efforts may focus on building interest among the possible clients (women) for their new launched product.   Since the company’s new product is shampoo for women; naturally, their target clients are women who may buy and use the shampoo after seeing the   shampoo commercial on television or any poster on bulletin boards. It is much delight to the women if they would know that there is a launching of the product in certain department or grocery stores that giving free new shampoo to the customers.   Another thing is; if one of your promotional tactics is to attract more clients from different places of the world into your business website, you can promote your web address through putting it in your print advertisements and business cards. (www.ehow.com) Based on the business research made, marketing and media campaign plan such as TV advertisements, print ads of any product and promotional campaign are very effective marketing strategies for any business to get the attention of prospective customers on the new product or service, and to increase their awareness to buy the certain product or service.  The same thing goes to revive the awareness of the clients about the existing product or service.    (www.ehow.com) The last but not the least, is the checking and balancing your business.  Every year, a company should have a complete evaluation or assessment on the entire marketing plans it made to promote the business.  Most importantly, to check the overhead expenses for the whole year and the profits that earned as well.  In this stage, you will surely determine if the marketing plan and the marketing strategies you made are gaining popularity and favorable or poor result.  (www.ehow.com) References: http://www.ehow.com/strategic-marketing/html, April 03, 2011   http://www.ehow.com/ _things-expect-strategic-marketing-plan/html, April 03, 2011

Topic: Strategic Marketing

Topic: Strategic Marketing In any business, strategic marketing plays a vital role in increasing the possibility of success. Thi...

AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE: SECTORAL DEVELOPMENTS, 1870-1914   I. INTRODUCTION Gross domestic product consists of a wide array of activities, and the structure of those activities has changed over time as the European economy has developed. Economists have long classified activities on the basis of a distinction between agriculture, industry and services, although there has been less than complete agreement on which occupations to include in each sector ( 1951). In this chapter we will follow the modern European convention of including forestry and fishing together with farming as “agriculture” and include mineral extraction together with manufacturing, construction and gas, electricity and water in “industry”. Services then covers all other activities, including transport and communications, distribution, finance, personal and professional services, and government. In 1870, most of Europe still had a majority of the labour force engaged in agriculture, although this was no longer the case in the most industrialised economies of northwest Europe. In particular, agriculture accounted for less than a quarter of the labour force in Britain. The share of the labour force in agriculture was considerably higher in southern Europe and in eastern and central Europe. Between 1870 and 1914, agriculture’s share of economic activity continued to shrink throughout Europe, but at varying rates. Of some importance in western Europe was the contrast between countries which protected their agriculture in the face of cheap imports from the New World, and countries where the agricultural interest lost out to the free trade lobby ( 1997). In many east European countries, however, it was the threat of grain invasion from Russia that was of more significance. Falling food prices and declining employment opportunities in farming led to worries about economic depression at the time, particularly in societies dominated by agriculture. However, it makes more sense to see the declining share of agriculture in employment as arising from the combination of a relatively low income elasticity of demand for food and a healthy pace of labour productivity growth due to technological progress and growing market integration. The flip side of the declining share of employment in agriculture was the rising share of industry and services. Much of the existing literature on national economies focuses on industry, with industrialisation seen as the key to economic development during this period ( 1969; 1985; 1981). A key theme here is the Second Industrial Revolution, with the development of modern industries based on scientific research, such as chemicals and electrical engineering, and involving the final steps towards genuine mass production (1990). The new technologies sometimes provided an opportunity for newly industrialising countries such as Germany or the Netherlands to leapfrog more established industrial countries such as Britain or Belgium (1997;  1994). A balanced account of European industry must also cover the less glamorous sectors such as textiles and food, drink and tobacco, as well as the countries that failed to make much headway in the process of industrialisation. Equally important, however, is the need to recognise that for many countries, services accounted for a larger share of economic activity than industry. Furthermore, a process of “industrialisation” of services was already underway, leading to high volumes of activity and high levels of productivity (2005b). In many ways, this process was linked to the Second Industrial Revolution, with high volume production in manufacturing only possible given the productivity improvements in transport and communications, distribution and finance ( 1977). However, it is important not to treat services as merely subservient to manufacturing. Many services are provided directly to consumers as well as to producers, and services matter for aggregate productivity not just because of their impact on industrial productivity, but because of their own productivity performance ( 1998). For an economy to have high living standards, it is necessary to have high productivity in all sectors. However, it is also clear that the structure of the economy matters, because value added per worker is higher in some sectors than in others. Since agriculture has historically tended to be the lowest value-added sector, the share of the labour force in agriculture turns out to be a very good predictor of per capita income. In general, European countries that remained heavily committed to agriculture remained poor, while those that reallocated labour to industry and services became better off ( 2005a). II. STRUCTURE OF THE ECONOMY Table 1 provides data on the sectoral distribution of the labour force between agriculture, industry and services for up to 20 countries in the three major regions of northwest Europe, southern Europe and central and eastern Europe. In the countries for which we have data in 1910, agriculture still accounted for around half of all employment. Our sample of countries for 1870 is smaller, but clearly indicates a larger share of employment in agriculture than in 1910. For the sample of 14 countries available in both years, the share of employment in agriculture declined from 51.7 per cent in 1870 to 41.4 per cent in 1913. Although on average, agriculture accounted for a larger share of the labour force in southern Europe than in northwest Europe in 1910, there was considerable variation across countries, with some south European countries such as France being less agricultural than some northwest European countries such as Finland. On the other hand, the share of the labour force accounted for by agriculture in the United Kingdom was as low as 22.2 percent in 1870, falling to just 11.8 per cent by 1910.On average, agriculture accounted for a still larger share of the labour force in central and eastern Europe than in southern Europe in 1910, but again there was considerable variation across countries, with Germany and Switzerland, for example, having agricultural shares more in line with many northwest European countries. As the share of the labour force in agriculture declined, the shares in industry and services increased, and this trend can also be seen in Table 1. For the fourteen country sample, industry expanded its share of employment from 26.9 to 32.3 per cent, while services increased their share from 21.4 to 26.3 per cent. Looking at the cross sectional variation in 1910, the share of industry was highest in northwest Europe and lowest in central and eastern Europe, with southern Europe occupying an intermediate position. However, as with agriculture, there was considerable crosscountry variation within each region. In the United Kingdom and Belgium, over 40 per cent of the labour force was engaged in industry in 1910, while in Bulgaria the figure was just 8.1 per cent. The share of the labour force in services in 1910 was highest in northwest Europe, lower in southern Europe and lower still in central and eastern Europe, but again with substantial variation across countries within each region. It is helpful at this point to note the relationship between these differences in the sectoral allocation of labour across sectors, and the prosperity of nations and regions. The point is perhaps most forcefully made with the help of Figure 1, showing the strong relationship between the level of per capita income and the share of the labour force in agriculture in 1913. It was already clear by this time that escaping from poverty required the reallocation of labour away from agriculture, so that modernising governments across Europe adopted industrialisation as a policy goal. However, the relationship between GDP per capita and the share of the labour force in industry was actually much less clear, as can be seen in Table 2. This table formalises the relationship between GDP per capita and the sectoral allocation of labour using regression analysis, and pooling cross sectional observations for a number of years between 1870 and 1992. The first column confirms the statistically significant negative relationship between living standards and the share of the labour force in agriculture, and also finds a significant positive relationship between GDP per capita and the share of the labour force in industry. However, notice that the fit of the equation, as measured by R2, is much weaker for industry than for agriculture. Note also that the fit becomes stronger once again in the regression of GDP per capita on the share of the labour force in services. III. AGRICULTURE 1. Opportunities and challenges Population growth and growing incomes increased the demand for agricultural products. Total consumption of calories per capita increased in some quite poor countries, such as Italy and, above all, demand shifted away from cereals towards more income-elastic goods such as livestock products in Southern Europe and fruit and vegetables in Northern Europe ( 2003a,  2005). The reduction in transport costs fostered trade in agricultural products, with a significant impact on relative prices, especially within agriculture. The real price of agricultural products remained constant, while the inter-sectoral terms of trade (the price of agricultural products relative to manufactures) improved in most countries or, at worst, remained constant ( 2002). Prices of crops (mainly cereals) declined relative to livestock in all European countries. Figures 2 and 3 show these trends in the inter-sectoral terms of trade and the relative price of crops to livestock for France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Industrialisation and modern economic growth offered opportunities of employment to farmers (or more precisely to their sons and daughters) and to agricultural capital, while scientific and technological progress provided new techniques, such as fertilisers. 2. The performance Conventional wisdom does not rate the performance of European agriculture during the period 1870-1913 very highly. However, as Table 3 shows, this view needs to be revised in the light of the quantitative evidence. The growth rate of gross output – i.e. the total production available for consumption within or outside agriculture - was quite high for the continent as a whole and also for the main regions. Although medium-term output trends were remarkably stable, production did nevertheless fluctuate quite a lot from one year to another, following the vagaries of the weather (1999). In particular, there is some statistical evidence of a slowdown in growth between 1873 and 1896 during the so-called Great Depression, although the severity of this has been somewhat exaggerated in the literature, leading one writer to coin the phrase “the myth of the Great Depression” (1969).   The country rankings of agricultural growth performance in Table 3 are also somewhat at odds with the conventional wisdom. In fact, the best growth performance by far was recorded by Russia, where production increased by a factor of 2.5 over 43 years, and the next highest increase was in the Habsburg empire. Clearly, these figures have to be considered with caution, but there is no doubt that Russia was a success story, as confirmed by the great increase in its agricultural exports (1960). Most countries increased agricultural production at a rate of around 1.0 to 1.5 per cent per annum, exceeding or keeping up with the increase in their population. In only four cases (Portugal, Greece, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) did agricultural production per capita decline. Between 1870 and 1913, trade in primary products, which went almost entirely to Western Europe, increased by a factor of 3.5. This increase fed Britons and allowed other Western Europeans to improve their nutritional standards. 3. The proximate causes of growth: factor inputs and TFP The growth of factor inputs contributed very little to the growth of agricultural output, as can be seen in Table 4. Unfortunately, it is not possible to measure the total stock of land in use, because the data on pasture are scarce and hardly comparable across countries. However, the data on cropland and tree-crops are good enough, and they do not show any Europe-wide growth. They remained constant or even declined in Western Europe (with the possible exception of Spain) and rose by a few percentage points in the East. The same pattern holds true for labour. The number of agricultural workers increased by almost a half in Russia, increased slightly in Germany and Italy and declined, by about 10 per cent, only in the most developed countries of Western Europe. With the exception of Russia, all these movements remain well within the margins of statistical error. For one thing, the number of permanent workers may not be a good proxy for the input of agricultural labour in nineteenth century Europe. A lot of non-agricultural workers helped at peak time (e.g. during harvests), the quality of work differed according to the age, sex and skill of the worker, and the number of hours worked or the intensity of work differed by country. Furthermore, all these features may have changed over time. The evidence on these issues is scarce, but the least bad guess suggests that these biases, although important if taken separately, might cancel each other out. For instance, it seems likely that the contribution of nonagricultural workers declined, while the number of hours worked increased in France, Ireland and Belgium ( 2005). Capital is the most difficult factor of production to measure accurately. As a first approximation, an increase in total agricultural capital would be expected, as a result of the growing use of modern, capital-intensive techniques. However, fixed agricultural capital consists largely of land improvements and buildings, which are bound to grow slowly, if at all, in long-settled areas like Europe. Indeed, the few available series rule out rapid growth, with the exception of Russia (2005) Capital stock declined in the United Kingdom and rose at about 1 per cent per annum in other West European countries. The effect of the diffusion of modern techniques can be detected in the growth of purchases outside agriculture. A simple measure of these purchases is the ratio between value added (which excludes them) and gross output (which includes them). As  demonstrates, the ratio in 1913 shows quite substantial differences among countries, which tally well with the conventional wisdom about the level of technical development in each country. The combination of substantial production growth and relatively slow increase in inputs implies a healthy growth of total factor productivity (TFP). Indeed, without an increase in TFP somewhere in the world, the agricultural terms of trade, or price of agricultural products relative to industrial products, would have risen, and this was not the case. In a well-known paper, (1991) has estimated rates of TFP growth for many countries, ranging from 0.19 per cent per annum in the United Kingdom to 1.53 per cent in Germany. Several authors have produced alternative estimates, including  (2005). Although the results do not always coincide with van Zanden’s, the story is broadly the same. The average rate of TFP growth for ten countries was 0.7 per cent per annum, which corresponds to a cumulated 30 to 40 per cent increase over the 1870-1913 period (2005). The European performance compares quite favourably with that of the countries of Western Settlement over the same years, with TFP in agriculture growing at a rate of 0.2 to 0.5 per cent per annum in the United States. 4. The underlying causes of growth: technical progress or market integration? Most authors attribute growth in TFP to technical progress, and there were some important technological innovations in nineteenth century European agriculture. Fallow practically disappeared from Western Europe, with the conspicuous exception of Spain, although it remained important in the East (2000)  In Russia the cropping ratio was still as low as 0.70 (i.e. about a third of land was under fallow) on the eve of World War I ( 1930). Tools improved. In the more backward countries, such as Russia, iron ploughs substituted for traditional wooden ploughs, while in more advanced areas, better design improved performance and reduced the need for draft power. Mechanisation proceeded more slowly, making a significant breakthrough only with the introduction of tractors after World War II. Machines such as the reaper were still pulled by animals, and the only “modern” machine widely used in the European countryside in the early twentieth century was the steam thresher ( 2003b). All these innovations continued the trends of the pre-1870 period. However, there was a major breakthrough with the massive adoption of chemical fertilisers. European farmers had used imported guano and nitrates since the 1830s, and the commercial production of phosphates had started in the 1840s. However, from the 1860s, the chemical industry made available new products such as ammonium sulphate and calcium-cyanamide, at lower and lower prices. In the Netherlands, for instance, the price of fertiliser relative to rye fell by 40 per cent from the 1870s to World War I ( 1994). Fertiliser consumption per hectare increased by a factor of 13 in Germany, from 3.1 kg of nutrients per hectare in 1880 to 42 in 1913 ( 2005). Not surprisingly, consumption was much higher in the Netherlands (163 kg per hectare). Perhaps more surprisingly, Italy (13.3 kg) and even Russia (6.9 kg) consumed more fertilisers per hectare than the United States (5.8 kg). Indeed fertilisers, as a land-saving innovation, were particularly suitable for a land-scarce area such as Europe. Although surely important, technical progress does not necessarily account for the whole of the growth in TFP. Productivity growth may also have been due to the more efficient allocation of resources, as a result of the growing development of markets. This process included commercialisation and market integration (price convergence). Although we know very little about the former, there is a substantial literature on market integration, at least for wheat (1986;  2005). However, the effects of this increasing market integration on agriculture are not well explored, with the exception of  (1989) for France, who focuses largely on the pre-railway age. To what extent did integration cause relative prices to change and to what extent did production adjust via local specialisation? To be sure, there is evidence of the growth of specialised production around the cities or in some wellendowed areas, such as the South Italian and Spanish vineyards. Also, there was a modest increase in the share of livestock in total gross output, from 41 to 46 per cent, consistent with the increase in its relative price (2004). However, much more detailed data would be needed to provide a comprehensive assessment of the real impact of commercialisation and globalisation. 5. The role of institutions By and large, farmers were left to themselves. Support for technical progress, although useful, was very limited and although land reform was much debated, very little action followed, except in Ireland. Even intervention in product markets was relatively modest. This statement may seem surprising, given the conventional wisdom about the protectionist backlash to the grain invasion from the United States (1997). However, three points need to be considered. First, Russia rather than the United States was the main invader in most European markets, at least for wheat. Second, the protectionist backlash developed in only a few Continental countries and the barriers to wheat imports were not that high, especially compared with the effects of market regulations since the 1930s. Third, wheat accounted for only a small part of total output – no more than 15 to 20 per cent. The rest of agriculture was affected much less by global competition, if at all, and did not trigger any comparable reaction. Indeed the aggregate Producer Subsidy Equivalent (PSE) was in the region of 5 per cent, compared with figures around 40 per cent in the heyday of the later Common Agricultural Policy of the European Economic Community (2005). Institutions loom large in the historical literature on agriculture, more often than not in the role of the villain. Most historians blame institutions for what they perceive as the disappointing performance of European agriculture. It is argued that common property of land and traditional contracts, most notably sharecropping, hindered innovation. The process of enclosing common land in Great Britain had long finished by 1870, but a similar process was going on in Continental Europe, possibly until the early twentieth century (1980). In Russia, serfdom had been abolished only in 1861, and land ownership had typically been vested in peasant communes, the obschina or mir (1983).  (1966) famously argued that the periodic redistribution of common land prevented investment and innovation, and retarded the migration of labour from the countryside to the cities. However, this interpretation has been severely criticised by (1994), who argues that communal institutions were in practice much more flexible than appears to be the case on paper. Sharecropping is often blamed for the poor performance of Mediterranean agriculture ( 1968). Landlords are said to have been more interested in accumulating land than in making productivity-increasing investments, while tenants were too poor to risk anything. The empirical evidence for this statement is, however, very thin. The failed adoption of innovations such as British “new husbandry” can be explained by environmental factors, while admittedly crude econometric tests fail to find any effect of contracts on productivity (1994) 1986) Note that in seeking to assess the importance of institutions, it is not appropriate simply to contrast the different growth rates of agricultural output in Russia and Britain, which are usually seen as the most backward and the most modern countries, respectively. First, the catching-up perspective suggests that we should expect a negative relationship between the growth rate and the starting level of productivity. Since Britain had the highest level of agricultural labour productivity in Europe in 1870, slow productivity growth was only to be expected. Similarly, the low initial level of productivity in Russia opened up the opportunity of rapid catching-up growth. Second, institutions are only one possible reason for the failure of a country to catch-up, with other factors such as land quality and economic policy also playing their part. IV. INDUSTRY 1. Europe’s industrial production, 1870-1913 Industrial production generally grew faster than GDP in Europe between 1870 and 1913, as Europe developed, and agriculture declined in relative importance. Table 5 presents data on the average annual growth rate of industrial production by countries grouped together in the main regions. The scope for rapid catching-up growth was greater in the less developed parts of Europe, which in 1870 had still not embarked upon the development of modern industry. In eastern and central Europe, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia all recorded rapid growth rates of industrial output as they began the process of catching-up on Britain, the most highly developed country in Europe. In northwestern Europe, the Netherlands and Sweden also began a sustained period of industrial development from around 1870. However, being backward is not sufficient for the achievement of rapid industrial growth, and many relatively poor countries, particularly in southern Europe, recorded relatively unimpressive rates of industrial output growth. It is therefore important to consider both levels and growth rates when assessing economic performance. Russia, for example, shows rapid industrial growth after 1870, but starting from an extremely low level of industrialisation. In Table 6, we thus see that despite this very rapid industrial growth after 1870, Russia had still reached only 15 per cent of the UK level of industrialisation on a per capita basis by 1900. By 1913, this had crept up only to 17.4 per cent, because the level of industrialisation was growing in Britain as well as in Russia, and part of the more rapid output growth in Russia reflected population expansion. Table 6 provides a good summary of the industrial development gradient within Europe, with the UK the most heavily industrialised country and with Belgium, France and Switzerland also substantially more heavily industrialised than Europe as a whole throughout the whole period 1860-1913. Sweden and Germany started the period with below average levels of per capita industrialisation, but ended it with significantly above average levels. Although per capita industrialisation increased in all countries, the level remained relatively low in much of Europe. European industrialisation can thus be thought of as geographically concentrated in a series of Marshallian districts. Marshall [1920] explained the spatial concentration of industrial production through external economies of scale, which he attributed to learning (knowledge spillovers between firms), matching (thick markets making it easier to match employers and employees) and sharing (giving firms better access to customers and suppliers in the presence of significant transport costs) (1994) One potential explanation for these patterns is simply geographical, with an important role for natural resource endowments. In particular, it would be difficult to understand patterns of industrial location at this time without taking into account mineral deposits. Put simply, much industrial development in the age of iron and steam took place around coal and ore fields, although this is not always particularly well captured by the boundaries of nation states (1981). However, the period after 1870 also saw the development of a new scientific approach to industry, which began a process of freeing industry from the constraints of location around natural resource deposits. This was most obvious in the development of wholly new industries such as synthetic dyestuffs, based on new chemical processes, or electrical goods, based around a new source of energy ( 1990;  1969). However, it also affected many old industries, such as brewing, where research could improve both processes and products, and iron, where research led to the utilisation of new ores and the production of better products, such as varieties of steel. Also, the development of “mass production” in engineering industries on the basis of the assembly of interchangeable parts, allowed the possibility of substituting machinery for skilled craft labour, threatening the position of established producers and creating opportunities for newly industrialising nations without a large stock of experienced workers. The “Second Industrial Revolution” thus offered countries with little previous industrial experience the opportunity to replace established producers through the more rapid development and adoption of new technology. 2. Performance of countries and regions The United Kingdom was Europe’s most industrialised country in 1860, in terms of the absolute level of production as well as on a per capita basis. However, Britain’s position was actually more vulnerable than is often appreciated. For, as (1985) notes, Britain’s achievement during the Industrial Revolution was not so much the achievement of high productivity in industry as the redeployment of labour away from agriculture in a large but still quite labour-intensive industrial sector. Britain had a very dominant position in world export markets in a small number of products, such as cotton textiles, iron and coal. Britain’s position was most obviously challenged during the period 1870-1913 by Germany and the United States. The challenge was most successful in heavy industry, where the scientific methods of the Second Industrial Revolution were developed. However, as  (1997) notes, there has been a tendency to overstate any failings in British industry at this time, and to ignore success stories. First, comparative labour productivity in manufacturing as a whole changed little between the three major industrialised countries of Britain, the United States and Germany during the period 1870-1913. So the proximate cause of the faster industrial output growth in Germany compared with Britain was simply the faster growth of the labour input, with labour productivity in Britain and Germany remaining broadly equal. Labour productivity in manufacturing in both countries remained substantially lower than in the United States, where higher labour productivity has usually been attributed to labour scarcity and natural resource abundance, leading already by the mid-nineteenth century to the development of a machine intensive technology that was not well suited to European conditions ( 1962; 1997). Second, although Germany did very well in a number of heavy industries, such as chemicals and iron and steel, where labour productivity was higher than in Britain, and where Germany took an impressive share of world export markets by 1913, there were also lighter industries such as textiles and food, drink and tobacco, where Britain retained a substantial productivity advantage and remained strong in world export markets (2005). In the case of shipbuilding, Britain even displaced the United States to become the world’s major producer as the industry moved from wood and sail to iron and steam ( 1979). The traditional view of French industry during the late nineteenth century was that it was relatively backward and, in contrast with Germany, failed to catch up with Britain (1964; 1969;  1977). Nevertheless, this generally negative assessment of French industrial performance was tempered by the fact that the pace of industrial output growth picked up after 1895, particularly in sectors based on the new technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution, such as electrical engineering, electro-metallurgy, electro-chemicals and motor vehicles (1977, 1979;1989)  However, the revisionist views of  (1978), who claimed that levels of industrial labour productivity were higher in France than in Great Britain for most of the nineteenth century, surely went too far in rehabilitating French industrial performance. Taking both output and employment from census sources,  (2004) finds that in 1906, output per worker in French industry was just 74.1 per cent of the British level. The French may have found an alternative path to the twentieth century, based on small family firms catering to niche markets, but it was not without its costs in terms of living standards ( 1978 ;1979) Most studies of Austria-Hungary emphasise the wide variation in the levels of economic development within the imperial territories. Austria (Cisleithania) was generally more industrialised than Hungary (Transleithania), but industry was far from evenly spread even within Austria ( 1977; 1981;  1983; 1984). Thus the Alpine lands and the Czech lands were much more developed than Galicia in the north and the Italian and Slavonic provinces in the south ( 1981). Viewed as a whole, Austria-Hungary had a relatively low level of industrialisation per capita, as can be seen in Table 6, but the Empire nevertheless produced a significant share of Europe’s industrial output on account of its size. Although early quantitative research indicated a very rapid growth rate of industrial output in the Austrian part of the Empire, subsequent research has modified this picture. Whereas  (1976) suggested an industrial growth rate of 3.8 per cent per annum for the period 1870-1913, the addition of a wider range of industries and the use of improved value added weights has reduced this to 2.5 per cent ( 1983;  2000). Allowing for a faster rate of growth in Hungary, however, produces a rate of industrial growth for the Empire as a whole of 2.8 per cent per annum, reported here in  ( 2000). The downward revision of the industrial growth rate by the later researchers was concentrated particularly in the period before 1896, leading to an unfortunate resurrection of the use of the term “Great Depression” for a period when output did not fall but continued to grow (1978; 1978). The catching-up perspective leads to the expectation that Austria-Hungary should have been experiencing rapid industrial growth to catch up with the leading European industrial nations at this time. From this perspective, Austria-Hungary clearly under-performed during the period 1870-1913. We have already noted in our discussion of Table 6 that Russia was a very backward economy in the mid-nineteenth century, so the rapid rate of industrial growth exhibited by Russia during the period 1870-1913 in Table 5 conforms to the predictions of the catching-up framework. Indeed, no other European country experienced such rapid industrial growth, which was generally of the order of 5 per cent per annum, with a particularly strong spurt during the 1890s. The experience of Tsarist Russia led  (1962) to formulate a number of propositions concerning the link between backwardness and economic development. These included a greater role for the state, substituting for the lack of private entrepreneurship, a greater focus on capital goods industries to get around the lack of consumer demand, a greater role for banks in directing scarce capital into industrial projects, and a greater role for imported technology. Gerschenkron placed little weight on the role of agriculture, which he saw as almost immune to change in backward societies. Although some of Gerschenkron’s generalisations do seem to fit the Russian case well, others have not stood up so well to quantitative scrutiny. The state did play a role in fostering industrialisation, fearing that Russia would lose its great power status without reform, and up-to-date technology was imported from abroad ( 1972). However, consumer goods such as textiles and foodstuffs accounted for a large share of industrial production, and banks did not play a decisive directing role in these industries (1986). Furthermore,  (1982) data suggest that agriculture made a significant contribution to Russian development through productivity growth (1986) Even more than Austria-Hungary, Russia remained an important European producer of industrial goods despite its relatively low level of per capita industrial production, because of its large size in population and territory. The catching-up perspective suggests that we should expect a similar performance from the countries of the northern and southern peripheries of Europe. In we see that per capita levels of industrialisation in Italy and Iberia were similar to levels in Scandinavia in 1860. Industrial growth rates in Table 5, however, were much higher in the Scandinavian countries than the Mediterranean countries. In particular, Sweden stands out as having experienced a very rapid phase of industrial growth, achieving a level of industrialisation by 1913 that was on a par with the European core. This represents a notable case of leap-frogging on the basis of the technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution, drawing particularly on Sweden’s abundant supply of hydro-electric power ( 1981). All the Scandinavian economies became significant exporters of timber and wood products, and benefited from the replacement of rags by wood pulp as the major raw material in paper manufacturing (1997). The relatively slow overall rate of industrial growth in Italy and Iberia masks some regional sparks of industrial development. The most important Mediterranean growth spurt was in northern Italy from the 1890s, in a triangle between Genoa, Milan and Turin, and based again on hydro-electric power ( 1981). There were also some stirrings of industrial growth in Spain, but based largely on traditional industrial products such as cotton textiles in Catalonia and iron and steel in the Basque region (1977:) The Balkan countries remained the least industrialised throughout the period (1997) 3. Developments in particular branches Industry covers a wide range of activities, and we now dig down below the aggregates of industrial production to survey briefly a number of important sectors, highlighting the contributions of the major European producers. We begin with coal, the major source of energy in the age of steam, but which was being increasingly challenged by the rise of electricity. As noted earlier, industry was heavily concentrated around coalfields during the nineteenth century, so it is not surprising to see in Table 7 that Britain was Europe’s major coal producer throughout the period. Germany was Europe’s second most important producer of coal at this time, with production growing more rapidly than in Britain. Belgium, a very small country but an early industrialiser, was overtaken by Germany, France and Russia as these much larger countries industrialised. Although coal production also grew rapidly in Austria- Hungary, it remained behind Belgium throughout the period, despite its much greater size. Although Britain remained Europe’s largest coal producer, and increased output significantly, labour productivity stagnated, with technological and organisational changes such as the replacement of bord and pillar working by longwall working methods, the mechanisation of cutting, loading, conveying and winding, merely offsetting diminishing returns, as pits were sunk ever deeper and coal was mined further from the pithead (1990). German growth was more rapid, and driven by bank finance, but allegations of entrepreneurial failure for the British industry as a whole, rather than for individual pit-owners, are probably wide of the mark in an industry described by (1984) as being as close as it is possible to get in practice to perfect competition (1971;  1971). Although European production was still increasing, coal from the New World was already being mined in more favourable geological conditions and taking an increasing share of world production ( 1954: 107). In iron and steel, major technological developments drew on science, with wrought iron increasingly replaced by varieties of mass-produced steel, following the introduction of the Bessemer process in 1856, the Siemens-Martin (open hearth) process in 1869, and the Thomas (basic) process in 1879 (1954). The general picture of Germany leap-frogging Britain is illustrated in Table 7, which shows output of pig iron among Europe’s main producers. Allegations of entrepreneurial failure in Britain have again been overdrawn, since account must be taken of iron ore endowments and demand side factors such as protective barriers raised in the rapidly growing markets of Germany and the United States, combined with Britain’s continued free trade policy (1971;1991). The Russian growth spurt of the 1890s is also evident, with Russia overtaking France before the French forged ahead again after 1900. During the period 1895-99, around 60 per cent of Russian iron and steel production was supplied to the railways, while the French boom was more oriented towards higher grade steels (1986 ;1979)  Austria-Hungary was also a major iron and steel producer despite a low per capita level of industrialisation. Like Russia, Austria-Hungary was dependent on the large home market, with a railway construction boom providing a substantial boost to demand ( 1977). During the period 1870-1914, the chemical industry was transformed on the basis of scientific research. The production of inorganic products such as soda ash, sulphuric acid and sodium sulphate, that had been produced on an industrial scale since the early nineteenth century, was revolutionised by new processes such as the replacement of the Leblanc process by the Solvay process in soda ash, and the introduction of electricity as an important agent in chemical processes (1954)  However, of even more significance for the long run development of the industry was the synthesis of organic (carbon-based) products, such as dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, perfumes and photographic chemicals ( 1954). Since the synthesis of organic products needed large quantities of inorganic chemicals, the production of sulphuric acid in Table 7 can be taken as an indicator of the general state of Europe’s national chemical industries ( 1954)  As in other heavy industries, Germany overtook Britain, although the scale of the German advantage towards the end of the period is understated, since Germany was much more dominant in organic products, where Switzerland was the only serious competitor. In synthetic dyestuffs, for example, Germany produced 85.1 per cent of world output in 1913 (1954:). The finding by  (1971) that Britain hung on to the Leblanc process after it was profitable to switch to the Solvay process is consistent with (1971) contention that competition generally ensured the adoption of the profit-maximising technology in pre-1914 Britain, since the soda ash industry was subject to a cartel. The chemical industry remained relatively underdeveloped in eastern Europe, with neither Russia nor Austria-Hungary featuring among the major producers. Small, relatively rich countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands were also significant producers, alongside France, while Italy showed strong growth from the 1890s. The Industrial Revolution began in cotton textiles, which continued to be an important branch of European industry until 1914. Britain remained the largest producer in the world despite some inevitable loss of market share as other countries industrialised ( 1974). The switch from mules to rings in spinning and from the powerloom to the automatic loom in weaving removed some of the skill from the production process, and enabled countries with a less skilled but cheaper labour force to compete with Britain, in line with V (1966) product cycle model. Seen from this perspective,  (1986) forceful allegations of British failure in cotton textiles are surprising, and it would seem more appropriate to ask how the British managed to hang on to such a large market share for so long ( 1987).  (2002) emphasise the importance of external economies of scale in this industry that was highly localised in Lancashire, but consisted of around 2,000 spinning and weaving firms and another 1,000 merchant companies involved in marketing. The product cycle perspective also helps to understand the high output figures achieved towards the end of the period in low-wage countries such as Russia and Austria-Hungary, with Russia almost catching-up on Germany, and with Austria- Hungary ahead of Italy and not too far behind France (1986;1977) The home market was more important for the food, drink and tobacco sector, although even here tradability was increasing with urbanisation and the emergence of a substantial urban working class demanding more processed foodstuffs. Data on beer production are available on a consistent basis in Table 7, and suggest a strong link to home market size and per capita income, with the highest levels of production and consumption in Germany and Britain, and with substantial production also in Austria- Hungary, France and Russia. Although possibilities of transporting such a heavy and perishable product were limited, a small country such as Belgium was able to export to a number of neighbouring countries. Of course, it must be borne in mind that France produced large quantities of wine for export as well as for home consumption, so that more general data on production of alcoholic drinks would show a much bigger contribution from the Mediterranean countries, including Italy, Spain and Portugal (2002). V. SERVICES 1. Europe’s service sector output, 1870-1914 Most economic histories of the period 1870-1914 pay little attention to services, apart from railways and banks, which are seen as supporting industry. The national accounting approach allows us to place the contributions of the railways and banks in the wider context of the service sector as a whole, and to bring out the contributions to consumers as well as to industrial producers. Railways moved people and agricultural produce as well as industrial goods, and it was not the sole purpose of banks to provide cheap loans to heavy industry. Furthermore, in addition to transport and communications and finance, services also comprised the important sectors of distribution, professional and personal services and government. 2. Regional developments The most highly developed service sectors were in northwest Europe, particularly in Britain and the Netherlands, where high productivity was achieved in the specialised and standardised supply of services in a highly urbanised environment. In sectors where international trade was possible, this played an important role in increasing the size of the market and allowing economies to benefit from the division of labour. High productivity required the “industrialisation” of services, involving a transition from customised, low-volume, high-margin business organised on the basis of networks, to standardised, high-volume, low-margin business with hierarchical management (2005b). In some sectors, such as shipping, and insurance, this involved the emergence of large firms in classic Chandlerian fashion, but in others, such as investment banking, it involved Marshallian external economies of scale for the financial districts of London and Amsterdam, on the basis of large numbers of small firms ( 2002; 2004) Large firms also grew in importance in a number of sectors where international trade was impractical, such as retail distribution, retail banking and the railways. Germany was a land of contrasts. Although it contained some modernised service sectors such as the railways and the universal banks, which have been highlighted in the literature, the continued importance of agriculture and the associated low levels of urban agglomeration limited the extent of the market for specialised services. Distribution remained dominated by small wholesalers and retailers, and although  (1962) focused on the role of the universal banks in directing funds into heavy industry, a balanced overview of the banking sector as a whole has to take account of the public savings banks (Sparkassen), credit co-operatives, mortgage banks and other small institutions that made up the banking sector, and which pulled down the average productivity performance of the German banking sector, with municipal control often leading to the sacrifice of profits for social objectives and the ambitions of local politicians (2002;2004) The service sector in Italy during the late nineteenth century bears a certain resemblance to its German counterpart, with the railways playing an important role in the unification of a new state that was keen to foster modernisation, and with universal banks channelling resources into heavy industry ( 1977)  However, recent research has tended to play down the contribution of these two sectors to economic growth, with (2001) pointing out that Italy’s per capita railway mileage was still only one-half that of France in 1913, and with  (1998) claiming that Italy’s universal banks tended to support large, established companies rather than provide venture capital to small, promising firms. The existing literature on services in the Habsburg Empire is also heavily oriented towards the railways and the banks. The Austro-Hungarian railway system was one of the largest in Europe, although this owed more to geography than high levels of economic development. Indeed, the railways were mostly single tracks with fewer sidings, used fewer locomotives and had a lower ratio of carried freight to the length of railways than in the rest of Europe (1977). In  (1962) work, the banks are seen as playing an important role in mobilising capital for industry and the railways. However, although there were a number of large joint-stock banks, particularly in Cisleithania, banks became less involved in financing investment in industry and the railways after the crash of 1873 ( 1976). After this date, the state and foreign capital played a greater role (1977). 3. Developments in particular sectors Table 8 provides some indicators of activity in Europe’s transport and communications sector on the eve of World War I. Railways are often seen as playing an important role in integrating national economies in the nineteenth century, and were in many cases actively promoted by governments seeking to speed up the process of industrialisation (1962). The largest railway systems were inevitably in the countries covering the largest geographical area, with central and eastern Europe claiming the three largest systems within the empires of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Western Europe was more fragmented politically, with the next largest systems being in France, the United Kingdom and Italy. To assess the economic significance of the American railways, (1964) proposed the concept of social savings. For freight traffic, this is calculated as the extra cost of transporting the quantity of freight shipped on the railways by the next best alternative. Where a good alternative existed, such as canals in the US case, the social saving was shown by Fogel to be relatively modest when expressed as a share of GNP. Fogel saw this as breaking the “axiom of indispensability” of the railways for US economic growth.  (1983) provides a survey of social savings estimates for a number of European countries, reproduced here in Table 9. A number of conclusions can be drawn from these estimates. First, the estimates conform broadly to Fogel’s pattern of relatively small social savings where a good system of inland waterways existed, such as in Belgium, England and Wales, France, Germany and Russia. However, social savings were much larger where there was no good system of inland waterways, such as in Spain, although even Spanish social savings were dwarfed by the case of Mexico, where railways do seem to have been indispensable. Second, the social savings of the railways increased over time, due to technological progress, which led to freight rates on the railways falling relative to freight rates on inland waterways. There was no scope for international competition in railways, so that relatively under-developed countries in Eastern Europe had the largest systems on account of their geographical size. In shipping, however, international competition was possible, allowing the most efficient providers to gain market share. Data on the net tonnage of the main European merchant fleets are shown in . By far the most successful nation in shipping was the United Kingdom, which operated around 35 per cent of the world merchant net tonnage throughout the period 1870-1913 ( [1914]). The next largest shipping nation was Germany, with less than 10per cent of world net tonnage, while the third largest owner of merchant tonnage was Norway. Indeed, the Scandinavian countries, despite their relatively small populations, revealed a strong comparative advantage in shipping at this time. Although Britain was being challenged by Germany and the United States in the scheduled liner business, the most industrialised part of the shipping sector, Britain’s position remained very strong in the more entrepreneurial tramping business ( 2005;  1995). Turning to telecommunications, international competition was not possible at this time, so that population and income per capita were the main determinants of the level of activity, as with the railways. The highest levels of activity, visible in were in the rich, large countries of Britain, France and Germany, but the poorer large countries such as Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy also show large volumes of business. By 1913, telephones were becoming more common, and there is some evidence to suggest that public sector telecommunications monopolies delayed the development of the telephone system to protect their investments in the older telegraph technology. Britain’s position in telecommunications therefore looks less impressive if telephone calls are included with telegrams (1994;2005)  provides some indicators of activity in finance and distribution in 1913. Financial activity is represented by banknotes in circulation and commercial bank deposits. Since estimates for individual countries are in national currencies, it is necessary to convert them to a common currency to make international comparisons, in this case in terms of 1913 US dollars. Again population size and per capita income are important determinants of activity. However, per capita income has a negative effect on the circulation of banknotes but a positive effect on the scale of bank deposits. This means that the degree of financial intermediation increases with the level of economic development ( 1987). Hence large, backward economies such as Russia and Austria-Hungary have high levels of banknote circulation, whilst even small but highly developed economies such as Belgium have quite high commercial bank deposits. Note that the United Kingdom, with the most highly developed financial sector, had very high levels of commercial bank deposits but very low levels of banknote circulation. The City of London established a dominant position at the centre of world finance in the second half of the nineteenth century, which it retained until after World War I, despite challenges from Berlin and Paris as well as New York ( 1969; 1995). To capture levels of activity in distribution, it is necessary to turn to indirect indicators such as the level of exports and domestic consumption of agricultural and manufactured products. Table 10 provides comparative data on merchandise exports. The most successful European exporters were the United Kingdom, Germany and France, whose exports dwarfed those of the large eastern economies, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Even the small nation of Belgium had exports that were larger than Austria-Hungary’s and close to the Russian level. Furthermore, if re-exports were to be added in, the Netherlands would also feature as a major international wholesale distributor, on account of its links with Indonesia. While wholesale distribution tended to remain in the hands of entrepreneurial merchant houses, the process of industrialising services went further in retailing, which saw the emergence of large scale organisations, including co-operative societies as well as department stores and multiple (or chain) stores ( 2005; 1992; 1954). This shift towards large-scale distribution was dependent on the process of urbanisation, and therefore proceeded more rapidly in industrialised areas than in more rural societies. There is less that can be said quantitatively about personal and professional services and government, and these parts of the economy will not be discussed in detail here. However, the provision of education is discussed in the chapter on population, in the context of human capital formation, while the role of government is considered more fully in the chapter on aggregate growth. VI. CONCLUSION This chapter reminds us that GDP consists of a wide variety of activities, and that prosperity depends both on achieving high productivity in each sector and on allocating resources efficiently across sectors. In general, we find that within Europe between 1870 and 1914, achieving high productivity overall required shifting labour out of agriculture and into industry and services. Although the literature has tended to focus on industrialisation as the main way out of economic backwardness, the growth and modernisation of the service sector was of at least equal importance. Indeed, much of the process of achieving high productivity in services required a kind of “service sector industrialisation”, with provision on a high volume basis, in a standardised form, using modern technology, overseen by hierarchical management. The discussion of individual sectors is organised around the catching-up framework, with low-productivity countries at the start of the period facing opportunities to grow rapidly by borrowing technology and organisational forms from high-productivity countries. However, the mere existence of an opportunity does not guarantee that catching-up will occur, and Europe’s economic history reminds us that backwardness can persist. This can be related to institutions, and in particular to the failure of institutional reforms to enable a country to take advantage of the potential for catching-up. However, we must be careful not to use institutions simply as a device to plug gaps in our knowledge. Breaking down economic activity by sector is one way of doing this, because it also suggests other factors, such as resource endowments for differences in performance between countries. Thus, for example, there can be no doubt that not having coalfields was a serious impediment to high productivity in the coal mining industry. And since coal was a major source of power, its availability was bound to affect the performance of countries in energy intensive sectors such as steel. Hence we do not need to appeal to institutional problems to explain why, for example, Portugal was not a major force in heavy industry.

AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE: SECTORAL DEVELOPMENTS, 1870-1914

AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE: SECTORAL DEVELOPMENTS, 1870-1914 I. INTRODUCTION Gross domestic product consists of a wide...