A Gift From Europe to the World: Globalization, Capitalist Expansionism and Professional Bicycle Road Racing

The History of Professional Road Cycling

by Jean-François Mignot

Abstract:

Why did cycling become professional as early as the late nineteenth century, while other sports (such as rugby) and other sport events (such as the Olympic Games) remained amateur until the 1980s? Why are the organizers of the most important bicycle races private companies, while in other sports such as soccer the main event organizer is a nonprofit organization? To what extent have bicycle races changed since the late nineteenth century? And how does cycling reflect long-term economic changes? The history of professional road cycling helps answer these questions and understand many related phenomena. This chapter provides a long-term, historical perspective on (1) professional road cycling’s economic agents, i.e., the public, race organizers, team sponsors and riders, and the relationships amongst them; (2) cycling’s governing body, the International Cycling Union; and (3) professional cycling’s final product, i.e., the show of bicycle races. More precisely, the chapter mostly focuses on the history of male professional road cycling in Western Europe since the late nineteenth century. It is founded on both an analysis of quantitative time series on the Grand Tours (and, to some extent, the classics) and a review of the existing literature on the history of professional cycling, whether economic history, institutional history, cultural history, or sport history.

URL: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01326719

Distributed by NEP-HIS on 2016-10-02

Revised by: Stefano Tijerina, Ph.D.

The professionalization and commercialization of sports illustrates the forces of capitalism in action, as its culture and institutional structures transition from the local to the global in response to the demands of the market and the increasing interdependence among multiple private and public stakeholders. In his brief history of professional road cycling Jean-François Mignot demonstrates how the sport is transformed throughout the twentieth century as it transitioned from amateur to professional. Mignot argues that the professionalization of this sport anticipated many other international sports because the forces of capitalism pressured the athletes to abandon their amateur status early on in order to secure an income.[1] His research reveals the early infiltration of the private sector within the culture of cycling in Europe, the institutional transformation of the sport, the market’s impact on the institutional structure of bicycle racing, and its integration into the global system. Ultimately, his historic analysis allows the possibility of drawing parallels with the processes of transformation experienced by other goods, commodities, and services that adapted to the inevitable pressures of the expansion of capitalism.

Jean-François Mignot’s research shows that the idea of organizing road race competitions around the commonly used bicycle emerged from the desire of newspapers across Europe to sell more newspapers through this new and creative marketing scheme. Newspapers in France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy began organizing races on public roads in the late 1800s to show the public that human and bicycles could cover vast distances across flat and mountainous terrain. As indicated by Mignot, early races of 25 to 70 hours in duration covering 250 to 400 kilometers became epic sporting events of duration and perseverance among extraordinary European athletes.[2] The media’s construct of these epic figures created the thirst for road cycling, but it was the fact that the spectator standing on the side of the road was only able to watch the spectacle for a few seconds and depended on the print media to recreate the rest of the race, that pushed newspapers into the sponsorship business. It was this interdependent relation between spectator, athlete, and newspapers that inspired the print media industry to organize these road races, hoping that races would become magnets for advertisement sales. As indicated by Mignot, “cycling fans demanded more information” and “pictures of the race,” and the race organizing newspapers were interested in supplying the demand by covering the races in detailed form as they watched circulations increase.[3]

The one-day races or “Classics” and the three-week “Grand Tours” became the backbone of professional road racing in Europe. By the 1930s newspapers had monopolized the sponsorship of the events, while fans filled the roadways accompanied by publicity caravans “that distributed product samples to spectators.”[4] Meanwhile bicycle and tire companies became the sponsors of teams, as individual riders were replaced by teams that worked on behalf of the stars that made up the top cycling teams in Europe.[5]

In the early stages of professionalization, cycling stars did not receive any wages and were therefore forced to secure their income through race earnings. The increase in the popularity of the sport was followed by the increase in riders’ income.[6] The interdependent relations necessary for the expansion of capitalism slowly developed; increasing sales motivated the newspapers to improve the quality of the spectacle by increase the race winnings, forcing the sponsors to offer better wages in order to recruit and maintain the loyalty of the top cyclists, ultimately attracting more fan-base that in turn attracted other secondary sponsors that turned the caravans into marketing spectacles as well. This became even more lucrative as other means of communication joined in, particularly radio and later on television.

Jean-François Mignot points out at the first three decades of the Cold War was a period of crisis for the sport in Europe, emphasizing that urbanization and the increasing sales of motorcycles forced bicycle manufacturers to decrease their team sponsorship funding and ultimately sending the salaries of professional riders in a downward spiral.[7] This, argued Mignot, forced the professional rider to seek sponsorships outside of the bicycle world.[8] The stars and their teams began to tap the “extra-sportif” market for sponsorship and this market segment was quick to capitalize on the opportunity.[9]

Jean-François Mignot points out that sponsoring newspapers and bicycle companies interested in protecting their own profit margins opposed the penetration of “extra-sportif” sponsors by trying to control the rules of the sport in order to impede their participation, but at the end the market forces prevailed.[10] This European crisis that unfolded between the 1950s and 1980s was in fact the initial era of global commercialization of the sport. Mignot’s Euro centrism impedes him from moving beyond the region’s Grand Tours and Classics, not recognizing that the “extra-sportif” sponsorships that challenged the status quo took professional cycling outside of Europe and introduced it to the rest of the world. For example, by the 1950s radio transmissions of the European races were common in distant places like Colombia where their own private sectors had replicated the European business model and established lucrative professional road races to supply the local demand for professional bicycle road racing. The first edition of the Colombian Grand Tour, La Vuelta a Colombia, was organized in 1951, and by then several local Classics like the Tunja-Bucaramanga and the Medellín-Sansón were already engrained in the Colombian cycling culture. As in the case of Europe, local newspapers like El Tiempo became interested in sponsoring the local Grand Classic as a means to increase sales and circulation, but contrary to the European distrust of “extra-sportif” sponsors, the Colombian organizers welcomed other private local sponsors including the national airline Avianca, the Bavaria brewery, Avisos Zeón and the Flota Mercante Grancolombiana.[11]

The crisis of professional bicycle road racing in Europe described by Mignot was certainly caused by a decreasing popularity of the sport and the internal struggles over the monopoly of the sponsorship and management of the sport, but it was also the market’s response to the emergence of other professional sports in Europe as well as the professional cyclist’s ability to capitalize on the globalization of the sport. It was an illustration of how, in a capitalist system, the internal saturation of a market led to the natural expansion into other global markets, as in the case of Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s.[12]

Such was the case of French Born, José Beyaerst, the 1948 Olympic road race champion who moved to Colombia after the Second World War, winning the second edition of the Vuelta a Colombia in 1952 and later on establishing a career as the coach for the Colombian national cycling team.[13] Beyaerst would make Colombia his home, developing the professionalization of the sport and becoming a key player in what would later become one of the cycling powers of the world. The expansionism of the sport would reach all corners of the world between the 1950s and the 1980s, it was a period of crisis for Europe as Mignot points out but it was a glorious time for global professional bicycle road racing.

Television was the game-changer, spearheading the resurgence of professional cycling in Europe in the 1980s. Taking advantage of the integration of Europe, race organizers capitalized on the magic of television to attract new European audiences, redesigning the stage circuits of the Grand Tours (Giro d’Italia, Vuelta a España, and the Tour de France) with the intention of tapping new urban centers that were outside of Spain, France, and Italy.[14] Television also globalized the European Grand Tours, introducing the cycling stars to the world, providing an opportunity for sponsors to reach a global audience, selling commercial air space, and as a result increasing revenues, salaries and profits for the whole sport.

Jean-François Mignot points out that the globalization of the sport also impacted the nature of cycling teams. By the 1980s the teams competing in the Grand Tours were no longer made up of Spanish, Italian, and French riders; their nationalities diversified and so did their sponsors.[15] Although Mignot highlights the fact that by 1986 the American Greg LeMond had won the Tour de France, Colombia’s Lucho Herrera had conquered the Vuelta a España (1987), the Russian Evgueni Berzin the Giro d’Italia (1994), and the Australian Cadel Evans the Tour de France (2011), he does not point out that these foreign cyclists also brought with them new local sponsors that then began to compete with European sponsors.[16] Mignot avoids talking about the American Lance Armstrong, leaving a large gap in the history of the globalization of the sport, considering that the American rider won seven consecutive Tour de France championships (1999-2005) before the US Anti-Doping Agency and the Union Cycliste Internationale stripped him from his titles after a doping scandal. Although LeMond popularized cycling racing in the United States it was Armstrong that converted it into a multi-billion dollar industry bringing in American brands such as RadioShack and Motorola into the world of cycling.

Jean-François Mignot’s research illustrates how the sport expanded globally as the Western World exported the idea of the professionalization and commercialization of cycling, taking advantage of the expansion of Western culture across the world, the increasing leisure time and incomes of the global population, and the increasing communications technology that allowed viewers from across the world to connect with the live stage by stage action of the Grand Tours and the Classics. Nevertheless, his Euro centric approach impedes him from explaining how the professionalization of the sport evolved outside of Europe. Although Mignot clarified early on that his analysis centered on Europe, this approach weakened his argument regarding the globalization of the sport and its repercussion on the European construct, as foreigners began to conquer and dominate the sport as in the case of Americans Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong, or the current stars South African born Christopher Froome and the Colombian climber Nairo Quintana. The incorporation of a broader global perspective would have allowed Mignot to test whether or not the professionalization of the sport in other markets was also spearheaded by other local newspapers or if on the contrary other media and non-media-based sponsors jumped on this business opportunity. It would have also been important to identify when professionalization took place in other markets to compare whether or not the influence of the European sport transcended the borders in a timely manner or even identifying political, economic, social, and cultural factors that delayed its expansion into other global markets. Moreover, it would have been important for Mignot to link the policies of the Union Cycliste Internationale to the globalization of the sport, as well as the escalation of global competition among bicycle manufacturers, and the global competition between scientists, technological designers, and pharmaceutical industries that centered on the legal and illegal preparation of the current athlete.

[1] Jean-François Mignot. “The History of Professional Road Cycling.” HAL archives-ouvertes.fr, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01326719/document, June 5, 2016, p. 4.

[2] Ibid., 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 3.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 4.

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] “Vuelta a Colombia Historia.” Ciclismo colombiano – La Vuelta a Colombia. April 25, 2007. Accessed November 21, 2016. http://ciclismo.al-dia.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Kidnapping of Lucho Herrera (and José Beyaert’s Narrow Escape”. Alps&Andes, March 2000. Accessed November 21, 2016. http://www.alpsandes.com/posts/clinginquisition.com/2013/04/the-kidnapping-of-lucho-herrera-and.html

 

[14] Mignot, “The History of Professional Road Cycling,” 5.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 6.

Medieval History and its Relevance to Modern Business

Joint publication review with The Long Run Blog

 

Title: The Medieval Origins of a Culture of Cooperation and Inclusive Political Institutions

The Medieval Origins of a Culture of Cooperation and Inclusive Political Institutions

 

By: Carmine Guerriero (ACLE, University of Amsterdam)

Abstract: This paper evaluates the relative importance of a “culture of cooperation,” understood as the implicit reward from cooperating in prisoner’s dilemma and investment types of activities, and “inclusive political institutions,” which enable the citizenry to check the executive authority. I divide Europe into 120 km X 120 km grid cells, and I exploit exogenous variation in both institutions driven by persistent medieval history. To elaborate, I document strong first-stage relationships between present-day norms of trust and respect and the severity of consumption risk-i.e., climate volatility-over the 1000-1600 period and between present-day regional political autonomy and the factors that raised the returns on elite-citizenry investments in the Middle Ages, i.e., the terrain ruggedness and the direct access to the coast. Using this instrumental variables approach, I show that only culture has a first order effect on development, even after controlling for country fixed effects, medieval innovations, the present-day role of medieval geography, and the factors modulating the impact of institutions. Crucially, the excluded instruments have no direct impact on development, and the effect of culture holds within pairs of adjacent grid cells with different medieval climate volatility. An explanation for these results is that culture, but not a more inclusive political process, is necessary to produce public-spirited politicians and push voters to punish political malfeasance. Micro-evidence from Italian Parliament data supports this idea.

URL: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:70879

Circulated by NEP-SOC on 2016-05-14

Reviewed by Catherine Casson (University of Manchester) and Mark Casson (University of Reading)

This paper takes a long-run approach to an investigation of the importance of a ‘culture of cooperation’ and ‘inclusive political institutions’. The author defines a ‘culture of cooperation’ as the behavioural characteristics of ‘trust, respect, control and obedience’, while the term ‘inclusive political institutions’ is defined as institutions which ‘enable the citizenry to check the executive authority’.

Analysis is focused on Europe and on the agrarian economy. The author suggests that cooperation in the middle ages was particularly associated with the monastic orders of the Cistercians and Franciscans. Their houses were generally located, the author argues, in areas with unpredictable climates. The ability of the monks to farm the land in a way that put such unproductive land to productive use attracted the support and cooperation of the local community. In addition these monastic orders also introduced new financial practices, including improvements in access to credit, which also fostered local community cooperation. Inclusive political institutions, the author suggests, were especially associated with the success of long-distance trade. This created a shared goal between the elite and citizens.

The paper suggests that contemporary cultures of cooperation and inclusive political institutions are influenced by medieval ones. The medieval data used for ‘culture’ is climate data and the modern data is the 2008 European Value Study. For inclusive political institutions the medieval data is ‘the discounted number of years Cistercian and Franciscan houses were active per square km over the 1000-1600 period’ (p. 9) while the modern data is on prosecutions of members of parliament in Italy in 1948-87.

Later in the paper some more specific hypotheses are presented as controls for change over time:

1. That Atlantic trade impacted on modern economic development
2. That micro-credit systems introduced by the Franciscan order strengthened contemporary credit markets
3. That monastic orders influenced religious beliefs in general, and that this influence may have had other, less defined, influences, on economic practice
4. That distance to Wittenberg, where Protestantism began, influenced the development of a ‘culture of cooperation’
5. Early transition to agriculture led to ‘higher inequality in gender roles’
6. That genetic diversity in a country had a negative impact on cooperation
7. That the suitability of soil for potato growing contributed to the development of institutions
8. That the Black Death raised standards of living
9. That education influenced the development of institutions and economic growth

The paper argues that the impact of the medieval culture of cooperation originating in the Cistercian and Franciscan monastic houses can be seen today. It also argues that this culture of cooperation has had a greater influence as a check on executive authority than inclusive political institutions.

Conflict, rather than cooperation, is often the term most associated with the middle ages. One of the benefits of this paper is that it highlights the presence of, and impact of, collaboration. Monastic orders are recognised in both history and economics literature for their important economic, as well as religious, impact. Their use to assess a culture of cooperation is therefore helpful, but they are perhaps a less obvious choice for an assessment of inclusive political institutions. One potential way in which the paper could be developed would be by expanding the scope to cover both urban and rural locations. Such an extension would retain the presence of monastic orders (and indeed extend it to cover urban ones) and, more significantly, allow urban political institutions to be considered. The presence of these institutions is briefly discussed on p. 12 but the issue is not developed further. Many of these town governments had as a shared goal the long-distance trade alluded to in the paper. They also offer more equivalent data to the contemporary data used as a proxy for inclusive political institutions.

Continuity and change over time is a key focus on the paper and the author shows an awareness of some key developments that occurred from the medieval to the modern period. The selection of the controls shows an engagement with recent secondary literature but does introduce additional time periods (such as the Neolithic), specific events (for example the Black Death) and general trends (for example the expansion of education). The paper could be strengthened by more clearly outlining the chronology of these events, and perhaps by narrowing the list of controls used.

Connections between contemporary and historic business have been increasingly recognised and explored in academic literature. The subject of this paper is therefore related to a growing trend to examine the medieval origins of many economic processes. Monasteries have been identified as key players in the ‘multinational enterprise’ of medieval pilgrimage and as originations of sophisticated forms of financial transactions (Bell and Dale, 2011; Bell, Brooks and Dryburgh, 2007). They were also important speculators in the property market (Baker and Holt, 2004; Bouchard, 1991; Casson and Casson, 2016).

Financial crises are a further topic that can be examined through the surviving qualitative and quantitative sources from the middle ages. In the light of the financial crisis of 2008 there has been a recognition that a long-run perspective, starting as early as the middle ages, provides the opportunity to study cycles of growth and decline. Surviving medieval records from the English government, for example, provide detailed data that can be subjected to statistical analysis, as shown in the work of Bell, Brooks and Moore (Bell, Brooks and Moore, 2014; Bell, Brooks and Moore, 2013). The importance of medieval data has also been highlighted in recent work on historic GDP (Broadberry et al, 2015).

Innovation and knowledge acquisition in the middle ages have recently been examined using both modelling approaches from economics, and historical case studies. De la Croix, Doepke and Mokyr (2016) have shown, using their combined expertise in the fields of economics and history, the important foundation that medieval guilds provided in the transmission of knowledge across Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile Davids and de Munck’s edited collection on Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities has used historical case studies to demonstrate that medieval cities saw a clear connection between the skills of their population and the overall economic performance of their city, and developed strategies that were intended to make their city economically resilient (Davids and De Munck, 2014; Casson, 2012).

Entrepreneurship can also be examined in a long-run context. Business records, letters, literary sources and government records all demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, the origins of enterprise lie in the middle ages rather than the Industrial Revolution. Medieval entrepreneurs were involved in a range of activities, including infrastructure developments, property speculation and factory foundation (Casson and Casson, 2013a; Casson and Casson, 2013b; Landes, Mokyr and Baumol, 2012)

Overall, one of the key strengths of this paper is the contribution that it makes to this broader research agenda on the parallels between medieval and modern business.

 

References

Baker, N. and R. Holt (2004), Urban Growth and the Medieval Church: Gloucester and Worcester (Routledge, Aldershot).

Bell, A. R., Brooks, C. and Moore, T. K. (2014), ‘The credit relationship between Henry III and merchants of Douai and Ypres, 1247-70’, Economic History Review, 67 (1), 123-145. doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.12013.

Bell, A., Brooks, C. and Moore, T. (2013), ‘Medieval foreign exchange: A time series anaylsis’ in M. Casson and N. Hashimzade (eds.) Large Databases in Economic History: Research Methods and Case Studies (Routledge, Abingdon), 97-123.

Bell, A. R. and Dale, R. S. (2011), ‘The medieval pilgrimage business’, Enterprise and Society, 12 (3), 601-627. doi: 10.1093/es/khr014.

Bell, A. R., C. Brooks, C. and P. R. Dryburgh, P. R. (2007), The English Wool Market, c.1230-1327 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).

Broadberry, S., B. Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton and B. van Leeuwen (2015), British Economic Growth, 1270-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Bouchard, C. B. (1991), Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-century Burgundy (Ithaca, NY).

Casson, C. (2012), ‘Reputation and Responsibility in Medieval English Towns: Civic Concerns with the Regulation of Trade’, Urban History 39 (3), 387-408. doi:10.1017/S0963926812000193.

Casson, C. and Casson, M. (2016), ‘Location, Location, Location? Analysing Property Rents in Medieval Gloucester’ Economic History Review 69: 2 pp. 575-99 DOI:10.1111/ehr.12117.

Casson, M. and Casson C. (2013), The Entrepreneur in History: From Medieval Merchant to Modern Business Leader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

Casson, M. and Casson C. eds. (2013), History of Entrepreneurship: Innovation and Risk Taking, 1200-2000 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2 vols).

Davids, K. and B. de Munck, eds. (2014), Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities (Ashgate: Farnham).

De la Croix, D., M. Doepke and J. Mokyr (2016), ‘Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Pre-Industrial Economy’ NBER Working Paper No. 22131, circulated by NEP-HIS on 2016-04-16.

Landes, D. S., J. Mokyr & W. J. Baumol (2012), The Invention of Enterprise:Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times (Princeton, Princeton University Press).

A Farewell to Arms? The Consequences of Warfare in Sub-Sahara Africa

Is Africa Different? Historical Conflict and State Development

by

Mark Dincecco (University of Michigan dincecco@umich.edu)

James Fenske (University of Oxford james.fenske@economics.ox.ac.uk)

Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato (IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca massimiliano.onorato@imtlucca.it)

ABSTRACT: We show that the consequences of historical warfare for state development differ for Sub-Saharan Africa. We identify the locations of more than 1,500 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts common-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and low civil conflict across much of the Old World. For Sub-Saharan Africa, historical warfare predicts special-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and high civil conflict. Our results offer new evidence about where and when war makes states.

URL:  http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ial:wpaper:8/2015&r=all

Distributed by NEP-HIS on 2015-09-05
 

Review by Anna Missiaia

 
The consequences of war on the development of nations have been gaining increasing attention in both Economics and Economic History alike. This paper by Dincecco, Frenske and Onorato, distributed on NEP-HIS on 2015-09-05 studies the consequences of wars on state development for Sub-Saharan Africa.

The paper refers to a rather large body of research developed within the field of Political Economics. The standard account, mostly focused on the European experience, predicts that the rise of warfare will lead, after the end of a conflict, to greater fiscal capacity and less civil conflict. The mechanism was first studied for Europe in the period 1500-1800 by Tilly (1993). Rulers generally had little political consequences from defeats, at least until the early 1800s, when Napoleon started replacing monarchs who had lost wars. Before then, wars were a quite regular phenomenon. Wars led to the expansion of the sources of taxations which was easily maintained in peace time. This enabled European states to enforce internal security more effectively, lowering civil conflict. The major implication of this perspective is that countries that experienced more wars in the past, today show greater fiscal capacity and less civil conflict (Fearon and Laiting, 2014; Besley and Persson, 2015).

As noted existing research focuses on Europe, so it is interesting to see that Dincecco, Frenske and Onorato (DFO) find different results when applying the same premises to Sub-Saharan Africa.  The paper by DFO begins by presenting two opposing views. On the one hand, there is evidence that the standard account of more wars in the past lead to greater fiscal capacity and less conflict today also applies to Sub-Sahara Africa. Specifically Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013) document evidence suggesting that more conflicts lead to more state centralization. Meanwhile that of Bates (2014) suggests that more centralized states are the most developed in the African continent. On the other hand, the opposing view focuses on a series of characteristics of the Sub-Saharan region (such as slave trade and colonization) that are responsible for the failure by the standard account to explain the trajectory of African states.

The Battle of Rocroi, by Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau.

The paper by DFO takes a comparative approach, testing the relationship between historical warfare and state development in several continents. The empirical strategy is rather intuitive, taking four measure of fiscal capacity of states today and regressing them on the number of conflicts that affected each region. They include a set of standard controls (latitude, population density, arable land and so on) and also continental fixed effects.  The same procedure is then repeated for three measure of civil conflict today.

The first result is that fiscal capacity today does increase in all continents for countries that experienced more wars in the past. Sub-Sahara Africa makes no exception here. The second result deals with civil conflict and this is different. Here, unlike the other continents, Sub-Sahara Africa shows a positive correlation between historical warfare and civil conflict today.

DFO are well aware of the possible shortcomings of their strategy, which are shared with virtually all works trying to address outcomes today caused by institutional arrangements from the past (one above all, Acemoglu et al. 2005). Dincecco and coauthors provide a comprehensive list of robustness checks by adding further observable controls. They also acknowledge that in spite of these controls, unobservable characteristics related to both historical warfare and present state development might still bias their results. They apply a quite interesting methodology to give an idea of the potential bias: they provide a measure, used by authors like Nunn and Wantchekon (2011), that estimates how much greater the impact of unobservable variables should be, relative to the observable, to explain the variation in the data. The result is that unobservable variables would need to have a nearly 20 times stronger impact to explain the variation in the sample. This result of course does not rule out that some of these variables have a role, but it ensure us that a fair amount of the explanatory power lies in the observable variables. Another remarkable feature of the paper by DFO is that it addresses the issue of the time span between the dependent and the explanatory variables. This is in a way a structural issue of all this branch of research, but it is always reassuring to see authors taking it into account. They do so by running the model with intermediate outcomes (around the beginning of the 20^th century) and showing that these two showed a similar pattern to today’s.

Somalia’s 1991 civil war

DFO also provide a tentative explanation to why states in Sub-Sahara Africa might behave differently than Europeans. DFO do so by including measures of democratization, ethnic fractionalization and social trust as controls in the regression. They add these one by one, looking at the effect of these controls on the magnitude of the coefficients of interest. The only control here that seems to have an effect on the coefficients is social trust. However, the authors interpret the result with caution because of the small sample size (here only Sub-Sahara Africa is included, lowering the number of observations to only 47).

Regarding the use of measure of social trust to explain the relationship between warfare and fiscal capacity/civil conflict today, I would also be worried about two other points: firstly, the measure of social trust is based on a survey from relatively recent times (1980s onward) while the relationship tested is between historical warfare and fiscal capacity/civil conflict today; secondly, this measure could be highly collinear with the variables considered (of course, the usual caveats on reverse causality that are typical in this line of research also apply here).

To conclude, the paper by DFO contributes to both the debate within Political Economics by quantitatively testing a well-established narrative on a region of the world that is very different from the standard one used in the past (meaning empirical studies based on Europe). By doing so, it does find that Sub-Sahara Africa experienced a different dynamic that led to a different outcome today. It also shows a very careful work on the data used and it addresses several sources of criticism. A possible next step could be to take further the analysis of the mechanism behind through which war impacts state development.

Bibliography

Acemoglu, D., , S. Johnson and J. Robinson (2001). “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review, 91: 1369-1401.

Bates, R. (2014). “The Imperial Peace,” in E. Akyeampong, R. Bates, N. Nunn, and J. Robinson, eds., Africa’s Development in Historical Perspective, pp. 424-46, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Besley, T. and T. Persson (2015). “State Capacity, Institutions, and Development.” The Political Economist Newsletter.

Fearon, J. and D. Laitin (2014). “Does Contemporary Armed Conflict Have Deep Historical Roots?” Working paper, Stanford University.

Michalopoulos, S. and E. Papaioannou (2011). “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa.” NBER Working Paper 17620.

Nunn, N. and L. Wantchekon (2011). “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa.” American Economic Review, 101: 3221-52.

Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, Capital, and European States, 990-1992. Cambridge: Blackwell

 

Was Stalin’s Economic Policy the Root of Nazi Germany’s Defeat?

Was Stalin Necessary for Russia’s Economic Development?

By Anton Cheremukhin (Dallas Fed), Mikhail Golosov (Princeton), Sergei Guriev (SciencesPo), Aleh Tsyvinski (Yale)

Abstract: This paper studies structural transformation of Soviet Russia in 1928-1940 from an agrarian to an industrial economy through the lens of a two-sector neoclassical growth model. We construct a large dataset that covers Soviet Russia during 1928-1940 and Tsarist Russia during 1885-1913. We use a two-sector growth model to compute sectoral TFPs as well as distortions and wedges in the capital, labor and product markets. We find that most wedges substantially increased in 1928-1935 and then fell in 1936-1940 relative to their 1885-1913 levels, while TFP remained generally below pre-WWI trends. Under the neoclassical growth model, projections of these estimated wedges imply that Stalin’s economic policies led to welfare loss of -24 percent of consumption in 1928-1940, but a +16 percent welfare gain after 1941. A representative consumer born at the start of Stalin’s policies in 1928 experiences a reduction in welfare of -1 percent of consumption, a number that does not take into account additional costs of political repression during this time period. We provide three additional counterfactuals: comparison with Japan, comparison with the New Economic Policy (NEP), and assuming alternative post-1940 growth scenarios.

URL: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19425

Distributed by NEP-HIS on 2013-09-28

Review by Emanuele Felice

Until the late 1950s, the era of rapid Soviet growth and of Sputnik, the main question among Western scholars was: When would the Soviet Union catch up with and overtake the U.S.?*

As Cheremukhin et al. correctly emphasize, the subject of this paper – Soviet industrialization in the 1930s – is one of the most important in economic history, and in world history: Soviet Union was the country which played by far the biggest role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, standing almost alone against the land force of the Third Reich and its allies for most of the war and causing 87% of the total Axis’ military deaths (in sharp contrast with World War I, when the Tsarist empire was defeated by a German Reich fighting on two fronts). Emerging from World War II as a superpower, the victorious Soviet Union contributed to shape the next four decades of human history, boasting among its technological achievements the first voyage of a human being to the space. At the same time and during the Stalin regime (1922-1953), the scale of (politically caused) human suffering has had few parallels in world history. Furthermore, as early as the 1930s Stalin’s rule was one of the first totalitarian regimes capable of reaching levels of oppressiveness and manipulation over society unobserved before.

For these reasons Stalin’s Soviet Union should continue to be interrogated by systematic studies. At the core of that regime was industrialization, which aimed to be the material pillar of a new «civilization» (e.g. Kotkin, 1995). Regarding its impact over policy making in the twentieth century, Stalin’s forced industrialization was a source of inspiration for both economists and politicians throughout the world: its planned, top-down, implementation was widely considered to be a successful, though harsh, strategy by some contemporaries.

Joseph Stalin (b 1878 – 1953), Leader of the Soviet Union (1922-1953)

And yet, we still have relatively little macro-economic evidence about the Stalinist period. The article Cheremukhin et al. aims to partially fill this gap, by providing consistent figures, some new arguments and insightful counterfactuals. It builds upon a remarkable amount of original research. First, it provides a comprehensive and coherent reconstruction of data on output, consumption, investments, foreign trade and labour force. These figures are presented separately for the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Data begins in the last decades of Tsarist Russia (1885-1913) and for the the Soviet Union covers the launch of the first five-year plan until the Nazi’s invasion (1928-1940).

Secondly, Cheremukhin et al. propose and elaborate a growth model for the Russian economy in those two periods (i.e. Tsarist Russian and pre-Nazi invention Soviet Union). This is a multi-sector neoclassical model, which is modified to allow for the peculiarity of the economy under scrutiny; namely, due to the institutional frictions and policies that distorted household and firm decisions, three wedges are defined, corresponding to the intratemporal between-sector distortions in capital and labor allocations and to an intertemporal distortion, and price scissors in agricultural prices (between producers and consumers) − which may also be thought of as a fourth wedge − are also introduced for the Stalin’s period.

It may be worth adding that when connecting wedges to policies, the Cheremukhin et al. appear to be adequately aware of the historical context and of the differences between a planned economy and a free-market one: for instance, the response of the Stalinist economy to a drop in agricultural output is likely to be the opposite − because of the price scissors policy which kept producer’s agricultural prices artificially low − to the predictions of a frictionless neoclassical growth model: it will probably lead to a further reallocation of labour from agriculture to industry and services and, therefore, to an additional reduction of agricultural output; such a distortion is here acknowledged and reasonably calibrated.

“Smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia”, early Soviet poster promoting industrialization, 1917-1921

Thirdly, the paper by Cheremukhin et al. further elaborates on data and models, by providing a number of counterfactuals. Comparisons are made with the Tsarist economy by extrapolating Tsarist wedges for 1885-1913 to the 1928-1940 years. Also by comparing the performance of both economies (Tsarist and Stalinist), for the years following 1940 under the assumption that World War II never happened.

Another comparison takes place with Japan, a country similar to Russia before World War I in terms of GDP levels and growth rates. Early in the twentieth century Japan suffered similar distortions as Russia but during the interwar period Japan undertook an economic transformation which provided Cheremukhin et al. an alternative scenario to both the Tsarist and the Stalin policies (the Japanese projections are based upon previous reconstructions of the Japanese macro-economic figures, which happen to be available for the same period as for Russia, 1885-1940).

Japanese assault on the entrenched Russian forces, 1904

And what is probably the most intriguing counterfactual, at least in actual historical terms, is yet one more alternative scenario, constructed by assuming that Lenin’s New Economic Policy or NEP (launched in 1921 and outliving Lenin until 1927) would have continued even after 1927: such a counterfactual requires elaborating a model for the NEP economy as well, but unfortunately the lack of reliable data for the years 1921 to 1927 makes the discussion for this scenario «particularly tentative». Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that two more alternative scenarios are provided for the Stalin economy based on alternative growth rates for the years 1940 to 1960 and again under the assumption that World War II never happened; and that robustness exercises are also performed (with further details provided in the appendix).

Broadly speaking, the results are not favourable to Stalin. According to Cheremukhin et al., Stalin was not necessary for Russian industrialization − neither, it could be consequently argued, to the defeat of Nazism and to the Russia’s rise to a superpower status. Actually, by 1940 the Tsarist economy would probably have reached levels of production and a structure of the economy similar to the Stalinist one, but which far less short-term human costs. This result may not be irreconcilable to Gerschenkron’s (1962) theses about substitute factor − in Russia this was the State, already exerting such a role in late Tzarist times − and the advantages of backwardness: these latter would have permitted to backward Russia, once its industrialization had been set in motion at the end of the nineteenth century, to see its distance to the industrialized West reduced by the time of World War II more than in World War I, in any case – that is, also under the Tzarist regime. It does contrast, however, with other findings from pioneering cliometric articles on the issue, such as the one by Robert Allen published almost twenty years ago, according to which Stalin’s planned system brought about rapid industrialization and even a significant increase of the standard of living (Allen, 1998). Similarly, but from a different perspective, long-run reconstructions of Soviet labour productivity tend to emphasize as a problem the slow-down in the period following post World War II, rather than the performance the 1930s (Harrison, 1998) – both Allen and Harrison are cited in this paper, but not these specific articles.

The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station under construction, South-Eastern Ukraine (the work was begun in 1927 and inaugurated in 1932)

Now, at the core of the results by Cheremukhin et al. is the finding that, according to their estimates, total factor productivity of the USSR in the non-agricultural sector did not grow from 1928 to 1940. Maybe it is worth discussing this point in a little more detail. Is such a finding plausible? At a first sight it seems puzzling, given the technological advance of that period especially in the heavy sectors. And yet, at a closer inspection it may turn out to be entirely logical: the growth of output was a consequence of massive inflows of inputs, both machinery (capital) and labour. But all considered these were not used in a more efficient way.

In the model by Cheremukhin et al., capital and labour are computed through a Cobb-Douglas production function, with constant elasticity coefficients for labour and capital (0.7 and 0.3 respectively in the non-agricultural sector; 0.55 and 0.14 in the agricultural one, thus assuming a land’s elasticity of 0.31). The authors make a point that the new labour force entering the non-agricultural sector was largely unskilled and, often, was not even usefully employed. Actually exceeding the real needs of that sector: this politically induced distortion could hardly have increased TFP (although, under different assumptions, it could be alternatively modeled through a decreasing elasticity of labour: but the results in terms of total output would not change). This may also explain the good performance of Soviet Union during World War II, when due to manpower shortage the exceeding labour force finally could be profitably employed. The capital stock is calculated by the authors at 1937 prices, for the years 1928-1940.

Anti-Nazi propaganda poster, 1945

We do not have enough information in order to judge whether a bias can be caused by the use of constant prices based on a late-year of the series. But this possible bias should lead to an underestimation of capital growth in that period  − given that quantities are probably weighted with relative prices lower in 1937 for the heavy sectors, than in 1928 − which would then produce an overestimation in the TFP growth proposed by the authors: in actual terms, therefore, the growth of TFP may be even lower than what estimated; in more general terms – and although caution is warranted for the lack of detailed figures – their results look realistic in this respect.

The most interesting finding, however, is the one relative to the NEP counterfactual. It is the most interesting because, in genuine historical terms, the Tzarist model was no longer a viable option to Stalin, while NEP’s strategy was. But of course, data for the NEP years are much more precarious and thus this counterfactual can only be a particularly tentative one. Nonetheless, the authors build two scenarios for the NEP policy: a lower-bound one, where a growth rate of TFP in manufacturing after 1928 similar to the average Tsarist 0.5% is tested; and an upper-bound one, with a growth rate of 2% similar to the one experienced by Japan in the same interwar period. In the first scenario the results for the Soviet economy would have been slightly worse, but in the second one much better. Given that the two scenarios correspond to the boundaries of the possibility frontier, we may conclude that probably, under the NEP, the performance of the Soviet economy would have been better than both the one observed under the Stalin and that predictable under the Tzar. This may confirm the view that the 1920s were somehow the “golden age” of Soviet communism, as well as the favourable assessment of Lenin’s and later of the collective Soviet leadership in that decade (although, admittedly, Lenin intended the NEP only as a temporary policy). After all, a more inclusive leadership – as opposed to the harshness of Stalinist autocracy in the 1930s, as well as to Hitler despotic conduct of war since the winter of 1941 – was also the one which helped the Red Army to win World War II.

“The victory of socialism in the USSR is guaranteed”, 1932

References

Allen,  Robert C., Capital accumulation, the soft budget constraint and Soviet industrialization, in «European Review of Economic History», 1998, 2(1), pp. 1-24.

Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic backwardness in historical perspective, Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962.

Harrison, Mark, Trends in Soviet Labour Productivity, 1928−85: War, postwar recovery, and slowdown, in «European Review of Economic History», 1998, 2(2), pp. 171-200.

Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1995.

Source of quote:
Gur Ofer (1987) “Soviet Economic Growth: 1928-1985,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 1767-1833 (cited in this paper, p. 2).

Does Technological Progress Lead to more Human Capital Formation? Evidence from the French Industrial Revolution

The Complementarity between Technology and Human Capital in the Early Phase of Industrialization

By Raphael Franck (Bar-Ilan University and Brown University, raphael.franck@biu.ac.il) and Oded Galor (Brown University, Oded_Galor@brown.edu)

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bro:econwp:2015-3&r=his

Abstract

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly deskilling process, the industrial revolution was conducive for human capital formation, generating broad increases in literacy rates and education attainment.

Review by Natacha Postel-Vinay (University of Warwick)

While human capital is often thought to be at the root of any development process, early industrialization itself is often thought to be de-skilling. Images of children working long hours executing repetitive tasks usually come up when one thinks of the Industrial Revolution (Humphries, 2010). Yet there is also the idea that industrial and technical development might lead to a greater need for skilled labour to maintain, fix and adapt new machinery. In this case industrial development might lead to a greater supply of schooling and might result in significant human capital improvements. Focusing on early French industrialization in a recent working paper (distributed by NEP-HIS on 2015-05-02), Franck and Galor attempt to demonstrate just this.

Steam engine from Lille (Nord departement)

Making use of data from the 1840s, the authors find a positive correlation across French departements between the number of steam engines and human capital indicators such as the share of literate conscripts, the share of pupils in the population, and the number of teachers (which would be more suggestive if also set relative to population). This correlation is best illustrated in a series of shaded maps (Figure 3), although the strikingly high levels schooling and literacy in the north-eastern part of France remain to be explained. Of course, correlation does not necessarily imply causation: it may be that other factors caused both the number of steam engines and the number of teachers to increase in certain areas, which could render any relationship between the two fortuitous.

Figure 3 in Franck and Oded Galor (2015).

To tackle this endogeneity problem, the authors make clever use of the fact that the first steam engine was introduced in 1735 in Fresnes-sur-Escaut in the Nord departement, near the northern tip of France. Since technology diffusion can be reasonably assumed to occur first around the region where the new technology was first introduced (which was indeed the case), it seems possible to use each departement’s distance from Fresnes-sur-Escaut as an instrument in the regression. In the first stage of the regression, they successfully show that the shorter a departement’s distance from the first steam engine location, the larger the number of steam engines in the departement, which seems quite reasonable.

To prove the exogeneity of the instrument, the authors have to show that human capital formation was not higher closer to the first steam engine location. This is trickier. To support their case, Franck and Galor investigate the relationship between distance from Nord and economic development indicators from around 1700, such as urban population, literacy rates and university location. They find that there is no correlation (although this may be surprising in light of Figure 1). More importantly, human capital may be quite imperfectly captured by these indicators in the pre-industrial era, when human capital may have developed in ways that are quite difficult to measure: through the transmission of skills from masters to apprentices, or learning-by-doing. It has often been shown that there was no clear relationship between technological progress and literacy rates in the early modern era (Mitch, 1999). Accordingly perhaps more detail should be provided in the paper as to why the steam engine was first introduced in this region and not elsewhere.

Figure 1 in Franck and Galor (2015)

Which brings me to a broader point about the paper. Although its stated aim is to investigate the causal relationship running from technological progress to human capital formation, causality could run the other way around. Although endogeneity issues are explicitly addressed in the paper from (and confounding factors such as land suitability, rainfall, access to waterways, distance from Paris, and market integration duly controlled for), the specific problem of reverse causality is not explicitly dealt with in the text. Reassuringly the IV model should theoretically take care of reverse causality, but the authors could still discuss this possibility in more detail.

Boys at school in Nord departement in the 19th c.

Overall though, Franck and Galor rather successfully tackle a very important and highly complex aspect of industrialization processes. By showing that technological improvement led to advances in human capital accumulation, these results in turn trigger a number of questions. Through which mechanism did industrialization lead to better schooling and literacy rates? Was the process demand-driven? Or did parents’ higher wages mean that children no longer had to work to help the family? Finally, could child labour abuse in factories have led to local initiatives to promote schooling? This latter hypothesis is discussed by Weissbach (1989), who emphasizes a particularly strong will to change the status quo in Alsatian and nearby regions — which could partly explain the greater spread of schooling in this part of France. Such inquiries could be the subject of fascinating future research.

Children in a textile factory in 19th c. Provence

References

Humphries, Jane. 2010. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitch, David. 1999. “The Role of Education and Skill in the British Industrial Revolution.” In Joel Mokyr, ed., The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, 2 ed. Boulder, nd CO: Westview Press, pp. 241–79.

Weissbach, L. S. 1989. Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth Century France: Assuring the Future Harvest. Louisiana State University Press.