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An intractable domestic conflict between forces on the right and the left roiled the Second Spanish Republic. We claim that international trade shocks exacerbated political instability. Leveraging an exposure design and disaggregated trade and employment data, we study the effects of import and export exposure on vote shares of parties and coalitions in the Republic's three elections, 1931, 1933, and 1936. An increase in import exposure had a modest effect on election outcomes. The primary vector of change was the disruption in export markets caused by the world depression and discriminatory trade practices, most importantly the United Kingdom's adoption of imperial preference. Trade dislocation harmed the left and benefitted the right. If trade had remained at 1928 levels, our projections show that the Popular Front would have gained a clear and comfortable majority in the decisive 1936 election.

Leveraging an original dataset on coastal shipping and invoking a new economic geography framework, we study the effects of domestic and international trade costs on industrial concentration and productivity growth in interwar Brazil. In the great wave of globalization before 1914, international trade costs were low and domestic costs high. Economic activity was dispersed along the coastline. The interwar period saw a reversal: international costs surged and domestic costs declined. Economic activity was increasingly concentrated in São Paulo. Agglomeration economies enabled productivity growth in the 1930s, mostly in durable and capital goods.

We study the effects of domestic conflict and external shocks on Spanish trade policy in the interwar period. Our account mobilizes a new granular dataset on exports and imports, and good-country level information on tariffs, trade agreements, and quotas. Into the Depression, the mainstay of policy was the tariff. The establishment of the Second Republic in 1931 was a turning point in policymaking. The new regime initiated bilateral trade negotiations. The Republic’s dilemma was to find countries willing to exchange market access. In a daunting international environment, the Spanish case offers a poignant reminder of the perils of going against the grain.

The moderating effects of World War I on wealth and income inequality varied with the belligerents. In Austria, the state embraced austerity measures to eliminate hyperinflation and respect commitments to the League of Nations. To fill the void, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (sdap) turned to its political stronghold in Vienna to advance its agenda of social spending and progressive taxation—Red Vienna’s signature program. The use of an electoral-cycle model finds that the construction of new buildings increased the party’s share of votes in municipal elections. The program mobilized support of young families in search of affordable and quality housing, also attracting the endorsement of the middle classes and elites, despite the higher tax burden imposed on them. The physical attributes of the new buildings and related investments, such as in schools, hospitals, and city infrastructure, benefited the entire population of Vienna.

Le présent article donne un nouvel éclairage sur la réintégration dans le marché du travail des anciens combattants francophones québécois de la Première Guerre mondiale. En exploitant les dossiers personnels des combattants et les informations sur les salaires et les professions des recensements de 1911 et 1921, les auteurs examinent si les soldats de retour au pays ont eu de meilleurs résultats sur le marché du travail que les non-soldats. Les résultats tendent à montrer que l'acquisition de capital social et humain agit positivement sur la réintégration des anciens combattants, l'ampleur de cette amélioration dépendant de l'âge, de la durée du service, du statut des soldats (volontaires ou conscrits), de la profession, du lieu de résidence et du fait que les recrues ont servi en Europe ou sont restées au Canada.

Belle Époque Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom. Exploiting a new granular trade dataset, we find that the number of products delivered abroad and destinations serviced more than doubled in less than 40 years. To explain this remarkable achievement, we study the relationship between trade costs and the intensive and extensive margins of trade. The establishment of a foreign diplomatic network that lowered beachhead costs and enabled the entry of new products was an essential fact of the trade boom. Interestingly, the expansion in trade in certain sectors did not translate into faster productivity growth. We offer some explanations.

We pose a seemingly ageless question in economic history. To what extent did new entrants in the late nineteenth-century cotton-textile industry threaten the customary markets of the European core? Exploiting a newly constructed dataset on textile imports to Spain, we find that as trade costs fell, new rivals began to sell a greater variety of products. Along this dimension, competition can be said to have increased. In response, producers in Europe adjusted the type and number of goods exported. By 1914, specialization mapped onto endowments of skilled labour, capital, and access to raw materials. While firms in new industrializing countries exported low-end varieties, incumbents in the core shipped high-end goods, unit values increasing with levels of development.

Understanding the relationship between trade and growth is still at the core of the economics profession. This column seeks to identify the pathways by which globalisation affects economic growth looking at the case of Belgium in the decades preceding the First World War. It argues that the collapse in fixed export costs promoted the entry of uncompetitive firms into export markets and as the trade component of GDP rose, the share of high performing firms contracted, slowing growth.

Informed by labor economics and labor history, the economic history of labor markets is an alternative and unified approach to study the wage and employment relation. This broad field encompasses the nature, organization, and conditions of work, as well as the non-wage compensation labor earned. It is an alternative approach because, unlike the economics’ textbook model, the economic historian does not perceive the labor market as static. Rather, economic history provides a framework to examine the feedback mechanisms – the dynamic relation – between labor markets and technological change, business organization, government regulation, product markets, and the preferences of participants themselves. Put differently, history provides rich examples of the many margins of adjustment in labor markets across space and time, in addition to wage and employment dimensions.

The received view pins the adoption of labor regulation before 1914 on domestic forces. Using directed dyad-year event history analysis, we find that trade was also a pathway of diffusion. Market access served as an important instrument to encourage the diffusion of labor regulation. The type of trade mattered as much as the volume. In the European core, states emulated the labor regulation of partners because intra-industry trade was important. The New World exported less differentiated products and pressures to imitate were weak.

Globalisation is often accused of unleashing a race to the bottom in labour regulation and social protection. The evidence suggests otherwise. This column explains how, historically, trade itself was a path to better labour regulation and social entitlements.

Standard trade theory, as invoked by political scientists and economists, would anticipate that workers in Belgium, a small Old World country, rich in labour relative to land, were in a good position to benefit from the wave of globalization before 1914. However, wage increases remained modest and ‘labour’ moved slowly towards adopting a free-trade position. Beginning in 1885, the Belgian labour party backed free trade, but its support was conditional on more and better social legislation. Belgian workers' wellbeing improved in the wave of globalization, but the vehicle was labour and social legislation and not rising wages.

This paper brings a historical perspective to debates on worktime differences across OECD countries, exploiting new data sets on hours of work per week, and days and hours of work per year between 1870 and 2000. We contest the popular view that the divergence in worktimes between Europe and North America and Australia is a recent phenomenon. Since 1870 the decline in weekly and annual hours was consistently greater in the Old World; the New World has had fewer days off for the last 130years. Labor power and inequality, held to be important determinants of worktime after 1970, had comparable effects in the period before 1913. We find that given their levels of income in 1870 New World workers supplied relatively too many hours of work.

Based largely on the Fifteenth Annual Report of the U.S. Department of Labor, published in 1900, we have built a sample of wages and hours for roughly fifty countries in six continents that covers the period 1890-1900. The Report, which is drawn from official (national) publications, gives information on normal or usual hours and earnings per week at the establishment level. To our knowledge, this is the most extensive data set of its kind totaling about 15,000 observations. We combine the data set with other country-specific evidence to derive implications about labour supply. The data reveal a cross-country supply curve that was markedly backward-bending. In addition, for a given wage level, we find a positive relation between a country's per-capita income and work hours. We interpret the patterns by proposing a standard utility function in consumption and hours of work, where a minimal level of consumption is introduced as a constraint. We interpret that minimum more broadly than biological subsistence. Rather minimal consumption is assumed to increase with the average income of a country. We also explore the possible role of climate in affecting the consumption constraint. Given the size of the data set, although coverage is uneven, we are able to estimate labour supply curves within countries and regions, in addition to making overall comparisons of work hours across countries. Our preliminary work suggests that a consumption constraint played a key role in the negative relation between wages and hours of work within countries, and that across countries higher average incomes, which effectively raised the constraint, promoted greater work hours.

This framework seems to mesh with the economic history of Canada's two central provinces, Ontario and Quebec, around the mid-twentieth century. Quebec was clearly the labour-abundant province, Ontario the capital-abundant region. Many labour reforms were first introduced in Ontario because it was the wealthier region. Since the two regions remained relatively large trading partners - as they were as long as tariffs protected Canadian industry - Quebec had an incentive to match Ontario's labour standards. ( 16) Thus, as long as Canada had effective tariff protection, producers and workers in the export industries in both regions benefited from rising labour standards, while consumers all across the country suffered, a result that was clearly not in the general interest. Since there was an incentive to overprotect, Ottawa's intervention in this area did not come up against provincial antagonism. In fact, sub-national authorities would have welcomed a central authority to coordinate standards. Richard Block and Karen Roberts (2000) provide the most exhaustive study of labour standards as they were in the late 1990s. Their results show a more consistent pattern. They divide provincial, territorial and federal labour standards for 1998 into nine categories reproduced in Table 3. ( 19) Each category is itself a composite of several indicators. Thus the category "paid time off" comprises, but is not restricted to, the variables found in Table 2. The calculation of the index value for each category followed a two-step procedure. First, individual provisions or labour standards in each category were given an index value that was greater the higher the level of employee protection; secondly, each provision was given a weight to represent its importance in its category. ( 20) There is some degree of arbitrariness in all this but, given the large number of standards included in the exercise, it would be expected that errors of commission would cancel out. The first two columns of Table 4 report the sum of the index values (nine labour standards and employment insurance) and the sum of the index values after each provision was deflated by an estimate of coverage. The higher the value, the greater the degree of labour protection. The last column of Table 4 gives the ranking of labour protection of each province and territory in North America in descending order. ( 21 ) Jurisdiction Minimum wage Over-time Paid time off Worker's compensation Federal 4.28 10.00 6.27 6.77 Alberta 1.52 (12) 7.28 (7) 7.61 (2) 6.69 (10) British Columbia 7.04 (1) 10.00 (1) 6.27 (4) 8.58 (3) Manitoba 2.44 (6) 10.00 (1) 5.89 (8) 6.54 (11) New Brunswick 2.44 (6) 3.21 (12) 5.38 (11) 5.99 (12) Newfoundland 2.44 (6) 4.57 (11) 5.53 (10) 7.25 (9) North West Territories 6.12 (3) 10.00 (1) 6.27 (4) 8.82 (1) Nova Scotia 2.44 (6) 1.85 (1) 5.71 (9) 7.32 (8) Ontario 6.12 (3) 7.28 (7) 6.07 (7) 7.64 (7) Prince Edward Island 2.44 (6) 5.92 (10) 5.20 (12) 7.72 (6) Quebec 6.12 (3) 7.28 (7) 7.23 (3) 8.35 (5) Saskatchewan 2.44 (6) 10.00 (1) 9.11 (1) 8.66 (2) Yukon 7.04 (1) 10.00 (1) 6.27 (4) 8.43 (4) Jurisdiction Collective Employment Unjust Occupational Advance notice bargaining equity discharge safety of plant closing and health largescale layoffs Federal 6.00 9.00 7.00 4.33 5.53 Alberta 6.00 (9) 8.10 (11) 7.00 3.07 (5) 0.00 (11) British Columbia 10.00 (1) 8.60 (5) 7.00 3.20 (2) 7.89 (1) Manitoba 9.00 (3) 9.10 (1) 7.00 3.13 (4) 6.03 (5) New Brunswick 8.00 (8) 8.10 (11) 7.00 2.11 (10) 5.71 (6) Newfoundland 9.00 (3) 8.60 (5) 7.00 2.08 (11) 5.03 (8) North West Territories 6.00 (9) 9.00 (3) 7.00 2.18 (8) 3.21 (10) Nova Scotia 6.00 (9) 9.10 (1) 7.00 2.18 (8) 6.37 (4) Ontario 9.00 (3) 8.50 (9) 7.00 3.24 (1) 7.03 (2) Prince Edward Island 9.00 (3) 8.60 (5) 7.00 1.87 (12) 0.00 (11) Quebec 10.00 (1) 9.00 (3) 7.00 2.63 (7) 4.50 (9) Saskatchewan 9.00 (3) 8.60 (5) 7.00 3.00 (6) 6.87 (3) Yukon 6.00 (9) 8.50 (9) 7.00 3.17 (3) 5.21 (7)

This article constructs new measures of worktime for Europe, North America, and Australia, 1870–1913. Great Britain began with the shortest work year and Belgium the longest. By 1913 certain continental countries approached British worktimes, and, consistent with recent findings on real wages, annual hours in Old and New Worlds had converged. Although globalization did not lead to a race to the bottom of worktimes, there is only partial evidence of a race to the top. National work routines, the outcome of different legal, labor, and political histories, mediated relations between hours and income.