The Road Not Taken - What Is The “Appropriate” Path to Development When Growth is Unbalanced?

This paper develops a model that endogenizes both directed technologies and demography. Potential innovators decide which technologies to develop after considering available factors of production, and individuals decide the quality and quantity of their children after considering available technologies. This interaction allows us to evaluate potentially divergent development paths. We nd that exogenous unskilled-labor biased technological growth can induce higher fertility and lower education, inhibiting overall growth in per person income. However, if technical progress is locally endogenous, increases in the overall workforce caused by unskilled intensive technological progress can make R&D more protable; this can actually induce more income growth can the alternative, skill-intensive path.

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Industrialization

Historically, industrialization has been associated with falling relative returns to skills. This fact is at odds with most theories of industrialization, which tend to imply rising skill premia as natural concomitants to economic growth. This paper develops a very simple model of historical growth to help solve this puzzle. Assuming that human capital is both a consumption good and an investment good, the model demonstrates how rising education levels, non-monotonic fertility rates, and falling skill premia can all be explained within one theory.

Human Capital and Technological Transition – Insights from the U.S.Navy

This paper explores the eects of human capital on workers during the latter 19th century by examining the specic case of the U.S. Navy. During this time, naval ocers belonged either to a regular or an engineer corps and had tasks assigned for their specialized training and experience. To test the eects of specialized skills on career performance, we compile educational data from original-source Naval Academy records for the graduating classes of 1858 to 1905. We merge these with career data extracted from ocial Navy registers for the years 1859 to 1907. This compilation comprises one of the longest and earliest longitudinal records of labor market earnings, education and experience of which we are aware. Our results suggest that wage premia for \engineer-skilled" ocers rapidly deteriorated over their careers; more traditionally skilled ocers were better compensated and promoted more frequently as their careers progressed. This compelled those with engineering skills to leave the service early, contributing to the Navy's failure to keep up with the technological frontier of the time.

The Appropriate Technology Frontier - Lessons for the Developing World

This paper presents a model of a developing economy that endogenizes both technological biases and demographic trends. As knowledge diffuses from foreign R&D-producing regions, potential innovators decide which technologies to develop after considering available factors of production, and individuals decide the quality and quantity of their children after considering available technologies. This interaction creates multiple growth paths- some economies develop labor-intensive techniques and expand the pool of unskilled labor; others grow into societies of highly skilled individuals and expanding outputs per capita. I find that if developing countries wish to achieve good prospects for income convergence, they should promote the flow of knowledge from the most developed regions, even if this results initially in a technology-skill mismatch. Such knowledge flows are more likely to promote the twin growths in human capital and technologies characteristic of the biggest economic success stories.

The Value of Human Capital during the Second Industrial Revolution—Evidence from the U.S. Navy

This paper explores the role of human capital on earnings and other measures of job performance during the late 19th century. During this time, U.S. Naval ocers belonged either to a regular or an engineer corps and had tasks assigned to their specialized training and experience. To test for the eects of specialized skills on performance, we compile educational data from original-source Naval Academy records for the graduating classes of 1858 to 1905. We merge these with career data extracted from official Navy registers for the years 1859 to 1907. This compilation comprises one of the longest and earliest longitudinal records of labor market earnings, education and experience of which we are aware. Our results suggest that greater technical skill translated into higher earnings early in careers, but wage premia diminished as careers progressed. From this evidence we argue that technical progress was more skill-depreciating than skill-biased during this period.

Naval Engineering and Labor Specialization during the Industrial Revolution

This paper explores the roles of capital- and technology-skill complementarities in labor allocation decisions within the U.S. Navy. During the latter 19th century the ocer corps was highly specialized, and was split between groups of line and sta ocers. This was also a time of dramatic technological changes which aected nearly every facet of naval opera- tions. Specically, naval technological developments tended to be \engineering-biased," in that they raised the relative importance of engineer-oriented skills. This created a dilemma for the Navy, as it navigated the balance between the benets of a specialized workforce implementing increasingly complex technologies with rising communication and coordina- tion costs. We rst document the extent of capital- and technology-skill complementarities within the navy which fostered greater labor specialization. We then show how the Navy vitiated the specialized human capital of ocers by blending the corps. The study oers in- sights into how an industry undergoing wrenching technological changes managed its labor and human capital allocation to help the U.S. become a world class naval power.

Fighting the forces of gravity – Seapower and maritime trade between the 18th and 20th centuries

How have large naval powers affected international commerce in history? Using a panel gravity model, we investigate the interactions of wars, alliances, naval power and trade from the 18th to mid-20th centuries. Striking an alliance with a naval power helps a country’s interstate commerce. Fighting a naval power on the other hand limits a country’s interstate commerce. Further, we split this effect on trade between an extensive effect (effect on a country’s trade when fighting a naval power) and an intensive effect (effect of that power gaining more naval strength). We conclude that the intensive effect is a powerful one – large navies have historically been destroyers of trade when mobilized to combat

Effects of supplementary feeds on growth and survival of freshwater giant prawn (Macrobrachium resenbergii [i.e. rosenbergii] deMan)

Highest growth of prawn was obtained with Feed B (743 kg/ha) with highest survival rate (60.88%) followed by Feed A where production and survival rate was 659 kg/ha and 53.50%, respectively. Feed A contained 30% dry ground cow viscera, 40% oil cake, 20% rice-bran and 10% heat bran. Feed conversion ratios were found to be 7.60:1 for Feed A and 6.46:1 for Feed B, which indicated that Feed B was more efficiently utilized by the prawn than Feed A. Statistical analysis revealed that the differences in production of prawns among the treatments were highly significant (P< 0.01)

Performance of fisheries sector planning in Bangladesh

The overall planning performance of the fisheries sector in Bangladesh over the past three decades was evaluated. Performance has been unsatisfactory largely due to contiguous overestimation of the planning targets and the existence of serious financial, technological, institutional and social constraints. Despite the remarkable growth in export earnings and a stable GDP contribution of 3.2–5.6%, budget allocations remained extremely low (0.7–1.4% of total outlay) in subsequent plan periods. Production from marine fisheries performed satisfactorily with slow growth in recent years, while inland fisheries with initial poor performance showed improvements from the mid-1980s owing to increased productivity in culture fisheries, particularly in pond aquaculture. Targets should be determined with the aid of a thorough review of past performances and there is an urgent need to streamline the implementation capability. Also, a shift from production-oriented planning and seeking technical solutions only to addressing broader institutional and social issues affecting the fisheries sector is essential. Government should emphasize the development of small-scale fisheries, strengthen extension–research linkage, improve infrastructure, build partnerships between relevant agencies and shift its top-down approach to planning towards a participatory bottom-up approach so as to release existing bottlenecks

Trade, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth which can endogenously account for both these facts, by allowing the factor bias of technological innovations to reflect the profit-maximising decisions of innovators. Endowments dictated that the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution be unskilled-labor biased. The transition to skill-biased technological change was due to a growth in "Baconian knowledge" and international trade. Simulations show that the model does a good job of tracking reality, at least until the mass education reforms of the late nineteenth century.