We live in an age of extraordinary corporate power and frequent corporate scandals: malfeasance at American defense contractors, savings and loans, and health-care companies in the 1980s and 1990s; grossly manipulated financial statements at major companies in the 1990s and early 2000s; blatant schemes of tax evasion in the same decades, conjured up by leading law and accounting firms; major safety lapses at Toyota, General Motors, and British Petroleum; rampant bribery of foreign officials by Siemens; and widespread deceptions/manipulations associated with the securitized mortgage markets, emissions standards by automakers such as Volkswagen, the setting of interbank interest rates, and the creation of unauthorized accounts at Wells Fargo.

This essay aims to introduce an issue of the RHE-JILAEH dedicated to the reconstruction of historical trade statistics of Latin American countries. It comments on the early perceptions of the quality and utility of historical trade statistics and on the way in which more recent analyses have overcome the distrust that prevailed until the last third of the 20th century. It then summarises the different criteria and methodologies that have been used to assess the accuracy and reliability of trade statistics in order to make them useful for the purpose of reconstructing new, more complete and precise trade series or re-estimating those available. The introduction ends with a brief description of the contents of this volume.

After the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia the issue of how to develop a backward economy towards a socialist society took pre-eminence. The relationship between agriculture and industry was one of the key issues. In this respect, the Left Opposition argued in favour of a Big Push for industrialisation financed through the exploitation of the peasantry, while the Right Deviation defended adjusting industrial growth to the development of the agricultural surplus. The First 5-Year Plan meant the complete victory of one of these positions. Unfortunately, all discussions were banned subsequently, the leading figures of these two factions were expelled from the Party and many of them executed. Yet, this problem was of the utmost importance for underdeveloped countries, as Development Economics was to discover 25 years later. This new branch of Economics would have benefitted greatly from the lessons of the Soviet experience regarding industrialisation, as well as from the theoretical discussions surrounding it.

This article examines Argentine relations with multilateral agencies and bankers during the first years of the last military dictatorship. It begins with an overview of relations and the external situation before the rise of the military and why a new economic team sought and restored Argentine credit standing. There follows a review of how links with the U.S. Treasury and international institutions lost significance and how cross-country financial intermediation, carried out mainly by leading state banks, gave foreign bankers a key role in the financing of Argentina’s foreign exchange needs. It also emphasises explicit and underlying motivations in the behaviour and policies of all actors involved and offers an evaluation of former Minister Martínez de Hoz’s efforts to justify these policies in the early 1980s.

This paper aims to evaluate the accuracy of official Bolivian foreign trade statistics. Results show large discrepancies between Bolivian records and those of its main trade partners during the First World War. Whereas the gap decreased thereafter, it stayed particularly high in the case of exports. This seems to be explained by mistakes in the geographical assignment by the trade partners rather than by an overvaluation of official Bolivian figures. This suggests that landlockness may have had a significant negative effect on the accuracy of trade statistics from the, a priori, more reliable countries. The study also helps to revisit the debate concerning the effect that tin exploitation had on the rest of the Bolivian economy during the first half of the 20th century.

This article explores the economic issues related to financial crises at insurance companies, using an example from the Great Depression, the National Surety Company. National Surety was a large and diverse American insurance company that experienced a major crisis in 1933 due to losses from its guarantees of mortgage-backed securities. I find that policyholders were able to stage a massive run on the company by demanding the return of their unearned premiums. A key dynamic of the crisis was that policyholders at an insurance company have a dual role as holders of liabilities and as providers of income. In addition, I establish that government officials believed National Surety to be systemically important, due to the size of its insurance business and because many of its counterparties were societal actors that these officials sought to protect. As a result, the New York State Insurance Commissioner used emergency powers to reorganize the company, with the goal of providing continuity to its business lines outside mortgage-backed security insurance.

The British monetary authorities have traditionally focused on broader monetary aggregates than their counterparts elsewhere. The reasons include: the willingness of UK banks to allow customers to make payments by drawing on time deposits, the particularities of the UK approach to managing the national debt and the foreign exchange reserves, and the flow-of-funds system of national accounts developed after World War II. This article outlines these reasons, and explores the implications for the UK's often fractious relationship with the International Monetary Fund during the 1950s and 1960s. It explains why IMF conditionality on loans to the UK focused on broad aggregates.

Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographical isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that prehistoric geographical isolation has been beneficial to development because it has contributed to contemporary cross-country differences in financial intermediary development. The relationship is robust to alternative samples, different estimation techniques, outliers and varying conditioning information sets. The established positive relationship between geographical isolation and financial intermediary development does not significantly extend to stock market development.