Eugene N. White

English

Research Papers in Economics

Commentary
Eugene N. White
JULY/AUGUST 2003      107
S
eeking to narrow the gap between two parallel
literatures, Peter Rousseau makes a welcome
addition to studies searching for links between
financial development and growth. One approach,
employed by macroeconomists, uses cross-sectional
and panel data on the contemporary world to
identify the existence of a relationship between
financial development and growth. Economic his-
torians have taken a different approach, concentrat-
ing on historical case studies and endeavoring to
find the pathways and magnitude of the relation-
ship. Rousseau combines the historian’s case study
approach with the macroeconomist’s techniques.
His case studies of the first modernizing economies
are valuable because it is widely held that the
greatest financial impulse to growth came in the
early stages of development. The first success stories
of modern economic growth have the benefit of
large mature literatures. 
Although modern financial markets first took
shape in the Netherlands, Rousseau’s first case, the
most important one is Great Britain, his second case.
Economic historians have long wrestled with the
question of why Britain was first to industrialize. In
the vast literature spawned by this question, there
is considerable attention to the role of finance in
creating the 19th century’s “workshop of the world.”
But, before considering this relatively narrow issue,
it is important to remember that Britain was not
simply the first country to industrialize and achieve
high rates of growth in its leading sectors. It was
also the first country to modernize its government,
changing how taxes were collected and forming a
modern capital market for government debt (Brewer,
1990; Neal, 1990; White, 2001). Its tax-smoothing
fiscal policy from the early 18th century onward
left continental powers in envy and earned the admi-
ration of today’s macroeconomists (Barro, 1987).
Furthermore, in addition to having a dynamic econ-
omy and an efficient macroeconomic policy regime,
it became a military powerhouse—thanks, in part,
to the carefully designed incentives for the opera-
tion of its navy (Allen, 2002).
Thus, Britain was the first modern nation in
not one, but many dimensions. This astonishing
achievement led contemporaries and later historians
to make comparisons with Britain’s continental
rivals, principally France. French observers in the
late 18th century found it difficult to believe that
France’s centuries-long rival had bypassed her. It
was all the more shocking because, at the beginning
of the 18th century, France looked good by most
comparisons. A population of 19 million (vs. Britain’s
7 million), a per capita gross domestic product (GDP)
comparable with Britain’s, a thriving manufacturing
sector, and a substantially lower average per capita
tax burden gave France a good position initially
(White, 2001). Britain’s quick success appears puz-
zling until one looks carefully at the preconditions
for economic growth.
As contemporary research on the connection
between finance and growth has discovered, many
of the clues to growth are not found in the statistics
but in the laws, regulations, and customs that govern
economic activity. Looking at output, labor, natural
resources, technology, and capital, we can see
whether the markets were competitive (allowing
for price flexibility and freedom of entry and exit)
and whether there were well-protected property and
contract rights. By the middle of the 18th century,
Britain was not perfect but was well ahead of France
by most of these measures, with the rest of the
continent much further behind. Simply put, Britain
was much closer to its production possibilities fron-
tier and more able to exploit technological change
because it had created markets and incentive struc-
tures for its pre-industrial economy. It had accom-
plished many of the institutional changes that the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank might
recommend to a developing country today. The
main effects of these institutional characteristics
point in the same direction as the newer research
on financial development and growth.
The point here is that the conditions that allow
capital markets to grease the wheels of economic
Eugene N. White is an economics professor at Rutgers University and
a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  
© 2003, The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.growth are also the conditions that ensure that other
markets work. What we know from history is that,
if one market meets the preconditions, it is likely
others will, because these changes are part of an
economywide overhaul. Rousseau’s statement—
that it was no coincidence that England, with the
key components of a financial system in place by
1750, was poised to tackle industrialization next—
is too modest an assessment. Britain had its other
factor, goods, and services markets set up for
growth, too.
To return to Rousseau’s first case, the Netherlands,
we are confronted with a country that had become
the center of world capital markets, well before
industrialization. Financial innovation and market
integration helped build many of the standard fea-
tures of financial systems—from banking to stock
exchanges. This development was accomplished at
a time when Europe and the Netherlands were
embarked on what is known as a “commercial revo-
lution,” linking and expanding markets for goods
and services within Europe and around the world.
The question here is whether financial development
in the Netherlands helped to spur on the commercial
revolution of the 17th century. 
There is a problem in using contemporary
macroeconomic techniques to examine the links
between financial development and the industrial
revolution or the commercial revolution, namely,
the absence of macroeconomic time series for the
17th and 18th centuries, well before the advent of
national income accounting. What Rousseau has
found are data for the monopoly international trad-
ing companies, the Dutch East India Company (VOC)
and the British East India Company (EIC), and for
the privileged banks, the Bank of Amsterdam and
the Bank of England. These four companies were
the giant chartered corporations of their day and
trading in their securities dominated the exchanges
(Neal, 1990). Whether studying the connection
between these trading companies and banks helps
us to gain some insight into the influence of finance
on economic growth depends first on the importance
of foreign trade in economic growth at the time
and second on whether the relationship between a
monopoly trading company and a highly privileged
bank tells us much about the financing of growth.
In the case of Britain, the current wisdom among
economic historians is that foreign trade was not
central to the country’s move to a higher growth
path in the first industrial revolution (Crouzet, 2001;
Cameron and Neal, 2003). Furthermore, the early
stages of the industrial revolution were not centered
in London or southern England, where the EIC and
Bank of England operated, but in northern areas,
where cotton mills and iron foundries were located.
From company and family records, scrutinized by
historians, we find that much of the financing for
these enterprises—which were small in comparison
with the EIC and the Bank of England—came from
informal networks and local bankers. The potential
link between financial development and the com-
mercial revolution appears stronger because
Amsterdam, the home of the Bank of Amsterdam,
was also the trading base for the VOC.
As far as the second question is concerned,
Rousseau needs to provide a stronger argument for
why the relationship between highly privileged
financial and non-financial companies should be
of interest. The activities of the VOC and the Dutch
bank could well have been closely linked for reasons
other than some inherent relationship between
finance and growth. The Dutch economic elite had
influence in both institutions and there appears to
have been a considerable overlap between the two
in terms of stockholders and directors. Both institu-
tions were intended to serve their commercial
interests and the state. It is hard to believe that a
privileged trading company created by the state
could be capital constrained when the state also
created the privileged bank. 
By selecting Britain and the Netherlands,
Rousseau has perhaps introduced some bias into
his study, as those two nations were the success
stories. In addition to the British and Dutch East India
companies, there was a French East India Company,
which was a notable failure in spite of the privileges
that it enjoyed. Was this failure due to the failure of
French entrepreneurship, or to the French navy to
safeguard the seas, or perhaps to the absence of
adequate financing? The Bank of England was
founded in 1697 and the Bank of Amsterdam in
1602. During John Law’s effort to reform royal
finances, the French finally created the Banque
Royale in 1716; but the collapse of the Mississippi
bubble left the country with a profound distaste for
banks (White, 2001). In the next half-century, private
banks and informal networks, including the notaries,
were the only sources of finance. An institution
parallel to the Dutch and British banks only reap-
peared with the establishment of the Discount Bank
in 1776. But this bank, primarily serving private
bankers rather than commerce or industry, dissolved
during the French Revolution; a permanent institu-
108 JULY/AUGUST 2003
White R EVIEWtion was put in place only with the creation of the
Bank of France in 1800. French money and capital
markets at the time have been generally and cor-
rectly characterized as inferior to their British coun-
terparts. Using government financial development
as a yardstick, there was no equivalent of standard
short-term British instruments, such as Navy bills
or Treasury notes. Instead, the French government
was forced to rely on privately contracted tax farmers
for advances against taxes. Long-term government
markets were also limited. The broad deep market
for the British consol did not exist in France, which
attempted to use heterogeneous and complicated
life annuities for long-term financing. Although it
may not be testable because of a lack of data, the
absence of a well-developed financial system sug-
gests that French trade could have been potentially
weakened, offering support for Rousseau’s conjec-
ture about the role of finance in British and Dutch
commercial development.
Turning to the empirical evidence for the
Netherlands, Rousseau finds that neither trade nor
money Granger-cause bank credit and that bank
credit Granger-causes money shipments, suggesting
that more credit had a positive effect on the VOC’s
commercial activity. Bank of Amsterdam credit
appears to drive VOC voyages but not the other way
around. In addition, Rousseau finds that Tobin’s Q
explains VOC investment, and neither bank credit
nor VOC debt adds significantly to explaining VOC
investment. He concludes that temporary credit
conditions at the bank did not alter the capital bud-
geting decisions and that the Amsterdam market
was deep enough for the VOC to secure funds based
on its shadow price. Yet, as already noted, this rela-
tionship may not be so surprising for two intercon-
nected privileged firms. The other issue, well beyond
the scope of this paper, is why, if the financial mar-
kets in the Netherlands were so brilliant and the
country was economically sophisticated in many
other aspects, did the first industrial surge occur in
Britain and not the Netherlands?
For Britain, Rousseau obtains similar results for
1710-45, showing that financing constraints did
not bind the EIC and that Tobin’s Q Granger-causes
investment. He concludes that the EIC was not
limited by the availability of finance and there was
a preexisting well-developed financial market. The
same caveats apply here except that the EIC played
a much smaller role in the British economy than
the VOC played in the Dutch economy.
For Britain, Rousseau also has annual data on
industrial production, international trade (the sum
of imports and exports), and the Bank of England
liabilities for 1728-1850. He finds some econometric
evidence that the bank’s liabilities Granger-cause
industrial production—or in his words that “finance
moved before output.” However, there is a problem
with this interpretation because industrial production
may cause trade and trade may cause bank lending.
Perhaps the biggest omission from this exercise is
the factor that causes the biggest fluctuations in the
financial markets and the whole economy: war.
The huge increases in financial aggregates are not
related to growth of the private sector but to war
finance and the needs of the government (Bordo
and White, 1991). 
For the 19th century, more modern data are
available. Rousseau breaks his study into two
periods—before and after 1850, reflecting the
quality and availability of data. For the earlier period
in the United States, the data for 1790-1850 look
more like a modern economy. It appears here that
the money stock and the number of listed securities
cause investment but not the other way around.
The impulse response results show that they are
also important for trade. Rousseau concludes that
for the United States “finance-led” growth has some
credibility. He finds similar results for Japan in the
period 1880-1913, with financial assets driving
private investment. For the second period, 1850-
1929, Rousseau has a data set of 17 countries,
enough to allow a cross-section analysis. The results
are very similar to those found by King and Levine
(1994) for the post-World War II period. The most
interesting finding is that output is more responsive
in the pre-1930 period, suggesting that financial
factors matter more in the early stages of economic
development. 
While using nontraditional data for the
Netherlands and Britain raises some potential prob-
lems, Rousseau’s analysis of newly assembled data
sets strengthens the view that finance is important
for economic growth, providing evidence of larger
effects for earlier stages of growth. Yet, the develop-
ment of financial markets was the product of broader
trends that established well-functioning markets
for goods and factors across the economy. Explaining
this change is a much greater challenge.
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White R EVIEW

A History of the European Economy,

France and the Failure to Modernize Macroeconomic Institutions,”

Tale of Two Currencies: British and French Finance During the Napoleonic Wars.”

The British Navy Rules: Monitoring and Incompatible Incentives in the Age of Fighting Sail.” Explorations in Economic History,

The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason. Cambridge:

The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State,

Historical perspectives on financial development and economic growth - commentary

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/03/07/White.pdf

Historical perspectives on financial development and economic growth - commentary

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