O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

Meu Twitter: https://twitter.com/PauloAlmeida53

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Mostrando postagens com marcador livros de história econômica. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador livros de história econômica. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 15 de novembro de 2016

Uma historia da economia global, desde 1500 - Joerg Baten

Ainda está muito caro para meus instintos consumistas: 32 dólares é preço de lançamento em livraria. Aposto como dentro de 3 meses vou poder encontrar por bem menos em abebooks.com, ou mesmo nos usados da Amazon.
Aguardemos, mesmo que eu tenha de revisar um curso de história econômica global que preciso dar a partir do mês de dezembro.
Confiemos no desprezo de alguns recebedores de cortesia.
É possível ler algumas partes neste link: http://widgets.eb20.com/jr/mpop.asp?IID=95538781
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A History of the Global Economy by Joerg Baten
Add to cart
US$ 32.00
Why are some parts of the world poor today, while others are rich? At which point in time did they diverge, and what were the reasons? These core questions are addressed in a concise and accessible introduction to global economic development since 1500. Leading economic historians from across the globe provide overviews of major world regions together with global comparison chapters and case studies highlighting key themes, individuals, processes and events. Utilising a set of common developmental indicators, the chapters address crucial issues such as how international trade and migration, institutions and flows of physical and human capital impacted economic growth. Richly illustrated with informative figures, maps, tables and charts, A History of the Global Economy summarises the key economic findings, debates and ideas, and provides students and the interested public with an up-to-date and engaging introduction to the origins and evolution of today's global economy.  less
Cambridge University Press; March 2016
ISBN 9781316665060
Read online, or download in secure EPUB or secure PDF format
Title: A History of the Global Economy
Author: Joerg Baten

quinta-feira, 26 de novembro de 2015

China, o Imperio do Carvao - livro de historia economica - Shellen Xiao Wu

Published by EH.Net (November 2015)

Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. xii + 266 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-8047-9284-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Ruixue Jia, School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California – San Diego.

China is the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world, and is also the largest user of coal-derived electricity. As of 2014, coal-fired power accounts for around 75 percent of China’s total power generation. It is no exaggeration to say that China’s growth in the past few decades has been fueled by coal. This sector also contributes to acute social problems in China including air pollution and workplace safety: China alone accounts for approximately 80 percent of the total deaths in coal mine accidents worldwide.

As an economist fascinated by this sector, I have studied the political economy of coal-fired power and coal mine accidents in China. However, I was ignorant of the history of this sector and find Shellen Xiao Wu’s book both enlightening and entertaining. It provides a vivid historical account of this sector as well as Chinese views of science and technology when the country was transformed from the late imperial to the modern era.
Focusing on the development of the coal sector, the book narrates the history of natural resource management in the late Qing dynasty and early republican period, during which China was forced to open to the West. On the one hand, many leading intellectuals and scholar-officials believed that China must learn from the West in technology for exploiting natural resources. On the other hand, foreign powers’ engagement in China’s natural resources also showed the Qing dynasty\’s vulnerability and weakness to imperialism. Both facilitated the state management and legal regulation of natural resources in China. Wu concludes that China and the West had converged in the theory and exploitation of natural resources by the end of the nineteenth century. This has important implications for China’s entry into the modern world and its impact on the development paths of China might be underestimated without understanding the history of this period.

Roughly following a chronological order, the book documents different aspects on how the Chinese worldview changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is particularly appealing that each chapter can be read independently. Chapters 1 through 3 include discussions on views of geology in historical China, Ferdinand von Richthofen’s contribution to Chinese perception of its mineral resources, and missionary translations of geology works. These chapters might be of interest to readers in the field of intellectual history.

I find that Chapters 4 through 6 are more interesting since they touched the economics and politics of natural resources management. In particular, Chapter 4 discusses the opening of modern enterprises in the self-strengthening movement lead by figures like Li Hongzhang and Zhang Zhidong. Chapters 5 and 6 speak to the politics of natural resources. In this period, China was often compared to “a poor man sitting unknowingly on great treasures while thieves attempted to snatch these away.” These two chapters demonstrate how control over natural resources became a symbol of sovereignty in the era of colonialism, which led to the convergence in natural resources management between China and the West.

The strength of this book is that it offers rich historical details and interesting stories such as the career of Ferdinand von Richthofen and other German engineers. However, this level of detail may preclude it from speaking to a broader audience. For instance, those – like me – interested in the economics side of the economic history may find it unsatisfying in answering important questions of interest: why was the self-strengthening movement unsuccessful? How to think about the influence of foreign engineers on domestic human capital in the late Qing period? Are there any implication of the historical events on the spatial distribution of natural resources over time in China? Naturally, answering these questions goes beyond the scope of the book.

In summary, Wu’s book examines different facets of China’s transformation in natural resource management. Historians and scholars interested in the history of science and modernization of China will find the book useful and entertaining. Of course, everyone fascinated by coal will find it is worthwhile reading.

Ruixue Jia studies the development, political economy and economic history of China.  Her publications include \”Elite Recruitment and Political Stability: The Impact of the Abolition of China\’s Civil Service Exam\” (with Ying Bai) Econometrica (forthcoming); \”Decentralization, Collusion and Coalmine Deaths\” (with Huihua Nie) Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming); \”Weather Shocks, Sweet Potatoes and Peasant Revolts in Historical China,\” Economic Journal (2014), and \”The Legacies of Forced Freedom: China\’s Treaty Ports\” Review of Economics and Statistics, 2014.

Copyright (c) 2015 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator (administrator@eh.net). Published by EH.Net (November 2015). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://eh.net/book-reviews/

terça-feira, 5 de agosto de 2014

Congratulations PRA: your paper on Economic Historiography is gaining traction (Academia.edu)

Bem, eu não sabia que um artigo de resenha bibliográfica poderia ganhar "tração", mas se o Academia.edu está dizendo deve ser verdade.
Em todo caso, em 2 dias, foi um dos mais downloadados (ugh!) artigos meus de que me lembre...
Aliás eu precisaria instalar contadores no meu site e no meu blog, inclusive um identificador de países, mas não sei bem como fazer isso.
Incompetente...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Hi Paulo Roberto,
Congratulations! You uploaded your paper 2 days ago and it is already gaining traction.
Total views since upload:




You got 35 views from the United States, Brazil, and Peru on "2479) Brazilian Economic Historiography: an essay on bibliographical synthesis (2013-14)".
Thanks,
The Academia.edu Team


O artigo está aqui:
Brazilian Economic Historiography: an essay on bibliographical synthesis”,  
História e Economia: Revista Interdisciplinar 
(vol. 12, n. 1, 1o. semestre de 2014, p, 149-165; ISSN: 1808-5318). 
Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/7858303/2479_Brazilian_Economic_Historiography_an_essay_on_bibliographical_synthesis_2013-14_).  
Relação de Originais n. 2479.

terça-feira, 12 de novembro de 2013

Economist: Great Depression, entao e agora - licoes da Historia

Economic history
What can we learn from the Depression?
The Economist, November 8th 2013, by C.R. | LONDON

SINCE the start of what some now call the “Great Recession” in 2007, economists have been unable to avoid comparing it with the Depression of the early 1930s. For some, the comparisons are explicit. Economists like Paul Krugman and Barry Eichengreen have drawn parallels between the two slumps. Olivier Blanchard, chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned several times over the last few years that the world risked falling into a new “Great Depression”. Economic historians themselves have had an unprecedented role in policy making during the recent crisis. Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve and Obama-administration advisors like Christina Romer all have academic backgrounds in the discipline.
Can economic historians give policy-makers advice on the basis of what they believed caused the Great Depression? A discussion of this topic by Britain’s top economic historians in a lecture at Cambridge University on November 4th suggested the question is more complex than it first appears. Although there are similarities between this crisis and that of the 1930s, much else—including technology, geopolitics, and the role of the state—has changed dramatically in the intervening period. Financial markets and credit systems now work in different ways than back then. Exotic derivatives like CDOs and CDSs only became widely used in the 1990s. Global economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank did not exist, and Europe was dominated by the Treaty of Versailles rather than the European Union.
But what has made producing lessons more difficult is that many traditional views about the causes of the Depression have been overturned by academics in recent decades.
Take, for example, the view that the rise of protectionism, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs of 1930, “caused” the Depression. According to research by Paul Bairoch, tariff rates in fact fell in the period immediately before the calamity. He found that average annual customs rates of countries in continental Europe remained broadly flat between 1913 and 1927—only rising from 24.6% to 24.9% in those fourteen years. European tariff rates continued to hold flat until 1930, well after the Depression had begun. Outside Europe, average tariff rates actually fell in the 1927-29 period as the result of the success of the International Economic Conference in 1927, at which countries around the world agreed to reduce barriers to trade.
Although the rise of protectionism increased the velocity and depth of the depression when tariffs started rising in 1930, they were still only responsible for part of the fall in world GDP during the Depression. Since American exports only accounted for 7% of GDP in 1929, falling trade volumes can only explain part of the 29.5% reduction in real GDP it experienced between 1929 and 1933.
The idea that the Wall Street crash caused the depression has also gone out of favour in recent years. This perception was popularised by the Harvard economist J. K. Galbraith, who in the 1950s emphasised the importance of the stock-market crash in sparking off the Great Depression.
However, historians in other parts of the world have pointed out that the global economy was already on a downward path before stock prices in New York started falling. American house prices peaked by the mid-1920s and the construction industry had gone into a tailspin by 1929. Industrial production in Germany and Britain, Europe’s largest economies, was already falling by mid-1928. The redirection of capital towards the overheating stock market in America exacerbated credit shortages elsewhere in the world before the crash. Businesses in Europe and Latin America were already facing a credit crunch by the start of 1929. As with the rise of protectionism, it seems that the Wall Street crash was a symptom of problems in the global economy, rather than the underlying cause of them.
Economic historians now focus on a different candidate to take the blame for the sudden economic collapse of the 1930s: the structure of the world financial system before 1929. In particular, the work of the economic historians such as Mr Eichengreen and Peter Temin has recently stressed the importance of the malfunctioning of the gold standard currency system as the cause of the Depression, as well as its severity.
From the mid-19th century most countries pegged their currencies to a fixed value of gold, an arrangement that became known as the “gold standard”. This system worked whilst countries helped each other with loans to solve periodic balance-of-payments crises (and while gold discoveries made for gentle price-level trends) but World War One disrupted this system. The result was that many countries found themselves with currencies fixed at an inappropriate rate of exchange to those of other countries. While France and America initially gained in the 1920s from holding their currencies at too low a value, countries like Britain and Germany suffered from recurrent balance-of-payments problems as the result their overvalued currencies.
This system came to a head when the global economy started what, at first, seemed to be a very ordinary business cycle downturn in the late-1920s. When the drop in global demand caused balance-of-payments crises in countries around the world due to gold outflows, they were forced to use fiscal and monetary means to deflate their economies to protect the fixed value of their currencies (they also resorted to tariffs).
This amplified the recession into a depression. According to some monetarist historians, the four waves of banking crises in the 1930-33 period that bankrupted half of America’s banks were caused by the Federal Reserve tightening monetary policy in response to gold outflows. Similar effects were seen in Europe too. Austerity in Germany and Austria lead to a wave of bank failures in 1931, plunging the central European economy into its most severe period of contraction. According to research by Mr Eichengreen, countries that escaped the gold standard and changed to floating exchange rates first, such as Britain in 1931 and America in 1933, tended to recover earlier and far faster. The critique of monetary policy as a conduit of Depression dates back to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's "Monetary History of the United States", first published in 1963.
Policy-makers have drawn some lessons from the 1930s. Unlike in the Depression, central banks in Britain and America avoided unnecessary monetary tightening. Instead, they slashed interest rates and used unconventional monetary stimulus such as quantitative easing in an effort to fend off deflation (a scourge of the Depression). The role of banking crises in turning a normal recession into a deep depression has also been recognised. Governments pulled out the stops to prevent the Lehman failure from generating a global financial meltdown, keenly aware of the role of financial contagion in the 1930s. 
However, lessons from the Great Depression for Europe's current problems may be more difficult to discern than one might assume. The euro zone is a fixed-exchange-rate system, with elements similar to those of the gold standard. But the political and economic constraints holding back policy-makers are different from those that prevailed in the 1930s. Economists now say that the higher level of financial integration in Europe today makes leaving the euro-zone a much riskier prospect than was leaving the gold standard was back in the 1930s. And the euro zone has a central bank that can print euros—something the gold-standard system lacked.
Perhaps economic historians can make a better contribution by ensuring the past is not abused in debates about modern-day crises. For instance, putting all the blame on Wall Street for the Great Depression—or on bankers in the current crisis—does not stand up to historical scrutiny. The responsibility may more properly lie in a complex combination of factors, like how global financial systems are structured. But this still needs be interpreted from modern day evidence rather than in over-simplistic “lessons” from the past. As the Irish economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda once wrote, “shattering dangerous myths about the past is the historian’s social responsibility”. Such sentiments should apply to the Great Depression as much as they do any other episode in history.

Suggested reading:
Bairoch, P., (1993). Economics & World History: Myths and Paradoxes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bernanke, B. S., (2000). Essays on the Great Depression. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Crafts, N.,and Fearon, P. (eds.), (2013). The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eichengreen, B., (1992). Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Eichengreen, B., and Temin, P., (1997). “The Gold Standard and the Great Depression”. NBER Working Paper 6060.
Friedman, M., and Schwartz, A. J., (1963). A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Galbraith, J. K., (1954). The Great Crash, 1929. New York: Time Incorporated.

Kindleberger, C. P., (1973). The World in Depression, 1929-39. Berkeley: University of California Press.