Introduction

Prior research into Latin American economic growth was undertaken mainly by Luis Bértola and José Antonio Ocampo, using Angus Maddison's GDP per capita data in the OECD data base. These authors focused primarily on the estimation of periods of convergence and divergence in relation to the leader countries. Our book revisits the subject, making use of the same data, but focusing on the magnitude of economic backwardness in order to highlight the degree of difficulty Latin American countries face when attempting to move beyond their current level of development. This research does not aim to question the value of the convergence criterion. On the contrary, it values the accumulation of historiographical knowledge and looks carefully at Maddison's research data. It is surprising to note that in 2008 Haiti's GDP per capita was US$686 at purchasing power parity (PPP), which is less than that estimated for all the countries in that region for 1820 (US$691 at PPP). This is not too different from Leandro Prados de la Escosura's proposal of US$649 for the same year. This would indicate that the poorest part of Latin America (represented by Haiti) has the same level of wealth as Latin American countries had at the time of independence, roughly 200 years ago. Among the leader economies, the United Kingdom had a similar figure of US$761 at PPP in 1500, five centuries ago. Haiti however, is most certainly not representative of the whole of Latin America.

By 1996, the CRDA had a lot to report. Over the previous decade, its 1.25 per cent casino ‘win’ proceeds had allowed it to fund a variety of projects in and around Atlantic City. Controversial at times, the CRDA had become a bulwark of expansion by the mid-1990s and had become a central player in the city's accelerated rebuilding programme. The CRDA's support for the new hotel towers sprouting up around town symbolized the new symbiosis between the casino industry, local and state government. They were the physical outcome of the philosophical sea change that occurred in the early 1990s, leading to an explosive synergy between casino executives, state legislators and local officials. As a state agency with voting local and casino representatives, the CRDA was the perfect entity to focus different casino community perspectives to support the original casino mission: Atlantic City's revitalization. Nineteen years into the experiment, redevelopment was all over the place – a huge new Convention Center under construction along with a ‘gateway’ park and lighthouse, new houses all over the uptown Inlet neighbourhood, a new aquarium and retail area under development at Gardner's basin, and a supermarket-anchored plaza in the heart of the city's retail district on Atlantic Avenue. Then there were the new, glistening hotel towers at Caesar's, Harrah's, Trump Plaza and the Tropicana. The CRDA had spent $175 million to help leverage $1.54 billion in casino hotel expansion by 1996, a sometimes controversial investment that had, in fact, been significant in restoring the industry to steady revenue growth.

Meanwhile, the long-lamented city government had launched a massive building campaign in the early 1990s to improve the look and overall functionality of the city. By late 1994, with some CRDA assistance, a new fire and police plaza had been built along with a new Police Athletic League building, the Garden Pier Arts Center, little league baseball fields and the brand new Atlantic City High School.

Inherent in any type of economic or industrial development, there appears to be various contradictions in emerging economies. Such contradictions and challenges may be exacerbated by the scale of emerging economies' developmental needs, particularly in countries with large populations such as India and China. These challenges and problems may be divided into the following categories: economic/trade-related challenges; demographics-related factors and resource-use challenges.

The three categories are interrelated because demographic factors may affect the scale and magnitude of resource use and consumption while both demographics and resource use are related to economic development. Sustainable development and adequate allocation of resources, particularly for consumption and economic expansion in demographically large countries, is a potential contradiction and dilemma faced by large developing economics.

Jared Diamond's publication Collapse indicates dramatically the problems and challenges that arise when ecological and natural resources are overused and overexploited, causing societies, cities and even civilizations to collapse and fail. Two conventional approaches to resolving natural resource use and/or shortage are to refer it to state management for allocation (e.g. nationalization) or to the private sector (privatization). The basic quest in carrying out these approaches is to restrict the depletion and overuse of natural resources which include energy resources. But Elinor Ostrom argues that neither of these approaches have unmitigated success in maintaining the sustainable long-term use of natural resources.

At the heart of strategies in managing resources are also the elements of rationality and self-motivation and interest in the use of resources.

I hope this book has told John and Elizabeth's story in rich and compelling detail. One of my aims has simply been to reclaim their story from the dust and silence of the archives as something vivid, moving, and worth telling for its intrinsic value, for its quiet dramas and joys, for the way in which it may resonate with our own lives. Is it, though, anything more than the story of one couple's marriage and business? John and Elizabeth's lives, individually and together, were prisms through which passed and were refracted some of the most powerful forces coursing through English society of their day – a period as significant as any other in the nation's history.

Across the eight tumultuous decades through which they lived the economy, international ties, politics, social structures and relations, the material world, and more were all fundamentally remade. Perhaps the first amongst those was economic change, whether or not we label it as ‘revolutionary’. Certainly, in his economic life, John did little that was revolutionary. People had been trading in similar patterns and using similar methods for decades, perhaps centuries. Nor was he one of a small band of brave pioneers. By the later eighteenth-century England's road system teemed with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar travellers and factors, many of them pushing the very same sorts of goods. But he saw and seized the openings that were being created to take and make new opportunities.

Casino management was still restless in late 1983. Industry executives looked at the regulatory system established by the Commission with disdain. One major problem was the lack of twenty-four-hour gaming, a limitation originally put in place to allow some downtime for the industry, but now just viewed as an obstacle to success. While the industry had certainly done quite well in its first five years without twenty-four-hour gambling, now it was seen as one way in which the state continued to inhibit an even more successful casino business. A new industry journal editorialized that ‘the city and the industry can probably develop more completely into the resort and convention centre which everyone wants, with twenty-four-hour gambling’. The vision of an Atlantic City that existed as a tourist destination beyond gambling reflected the persistence of the original motivation behind casino legalization: to restore Atlantic City as a resort town. But the reality was different. By 1983, it had become a casino town, a lucrative business community, albeit with many challenges and problems, from political corruption to a tightening business climate. It had not become a destination resort.

Persuading people to remain in town for a few days was not so important, however, as long as the casinos were making money. Making money was the salient characteristic of the casino industry, despite a slowdown that occurred after the ninth casino opened in 1982. The gambling market was still in expansion mode between 1983 and 1987, with two more casinos (Trump Plaza and Trump Castle) coming online. The industry still increased its collective gaming ‘win’ proceeds from $1.8 billion in 1983 to $2.5 billion in 1987. Total revenue also increased in these years, from $2.2 billion in 1983 to $3.1 billion in 1987. In terms of growth, the casino industry's second five years in Atlantic City (1984–9) were more restrained, though also steady. As a whole, the casino industry's revenue growth rate averaged 11.4 per cent between 1983 and 1987, compared to 87 per cent percent between 1979 and 1982.

The JUICE (Japan, US, India, China) energy entities are influential energy consumers in the international system. JUICE may be divided into two main categories, the fast-growing and newly emerging economies, including India and China, and the developed advanced economies, including Japan and the US. It may be possible to discuss the JUICE constituents in a realist framework, if they are described in terms of weaknesses and strengths that they have vis-a-vis each other in energy, other natural resources, their geopolitical reach to these resources and the ability to keep and maintain that reach. That discussion would be useful to establish a descriptive paradigm of the JUICE constituents, which are not only major energy consumers but also influential states in their own right.

It may also be possible to focus on the complementarity qualities each JUICE constituents has and to look, not in terms of weaknesses and strengths, but the inherent contradictions embodied in each of these constituents. It may, thereafter, be useful to examine the complementarity between them in terms of energy, whether in environmental technologies, usage or common needs. Realism promotes a zero-sum perspective that may be reflective of the competitive nature of states and their economies. The principle of ‘complementarity’ allows us to look at the element of coexistence, and to learn to live with energy giants in the age that inquires as to sustainability. In the process of nurturing coexistence we should expect a fair share of conflicts, tensions, cooperation and accommodation.

Debasement has always commanded a high degree of interest among historians, and rightly so. Strong currencies of high intrinsic worth are associated with successful trading nations, but also have connotations of probity and high moral worth. Reductions in the intrinsic content of the coinage seem in contrast to speak of spendthrift government policies, and dissolute behaviour born of lax personal and national standards of behaviour. Debasement is also often associated with deception and downright fraud, since the extent of the reduction in intrinsic content was often concealed from the public. Nevertheless, despite such attempted secrecy, debasements usually resulted in some (unpredictable) degree of price inflation, which was almost always widely unpopular.

Debasement undermines the functions and use of money in all its principal respects. Whether money was used as a measure or store of value, its alteration obviously reduced its ability to fulfilits core functions. Debasement also disrupted the operation of money as a medium of exchange, arguably its principal use in medieval and early modern societies. It introduced uncertainty, created winners and losers, and undermined confidence in established social and economic values, in both domestic and international trade and certainly also for all payments made for factors of production (labour, land, capital).

Nevertheless, despite the unpopularity of debasement, consideration of the needs of commerce leads to a more rounded view, which recognizes that reduction in the intrinsic content of the money was not in every case mistaken. Indeed, it is clear that in certain circumstances a currency might be too strong. Rather than simplistically declaring sound money to be good and weak money to be bad, a more sophisticated analysis is required which also considers how far the currency was capable of supplying the needs of the economy.

This chapter, rather than charting the sorry progress of debasement and its effects, looks instead at a period of English history in which too much stress may have been laid on the importance of retaining a high value silver coinage of unchanging worth, despite major shift s in the international values of precious metals.

‘One Hundred and Fifty Years of Achievement’

After John Shaw died in 1858 the firm he had founded went on to record a very long and successful history. This epilogue very briefly tells some of that story, concentrating in particular on the second and third generations, critical in the evolution of many family firms. In tracing these later developments we will rely quite heavily on two celebratory anniversary documents produced either by or for the firm. Though far from neutral, these sources have value in that they reveal the firm's perception of itself, how it understood its history, and how it ordered its priorities at two key dates, in 1895 and 1945.

In 1946 John Shaw and Sons Ltd. published a slim pamphlet celebrating its 150th anniversary. The little booklet opens with a sweeping vision of just how dramatically Britain had been changed over that span of years, charting across ‘the period of the firm's life’ the wars that had been fought (significant in that another great world war had only very recently been concluded), the heroes, Kings, and Queens who had come and gone, the revolutions defeated, the technologies accomplished. Against this backdrop of transformation the firm was made to standout as a still point of continuity, for ‘Yet to-day, the House of John Shaw and Sons, Wolverhampton, Limited, still carries on business with customers commercially descended from customers of the first John Shaw’.

Contemporary observers indicate that the Panic of 1819 was a traumatic experience for the new republic. For example, John C. Calhoun, discussing the situation with John Quincy Adams in 1820, said, ‘There has been within these two years an immense revolution of fortunes in every part of the Union: enormous numbers of persons utterly ruined; multitudes in deep distress; and a general mass disaffection to the government’. In the Boston newspapers, Andrew R. L. Cayton found that ‘complaints of Hard Times appear universal’ and that what was once a thriving town ‘presents a dull and uncheery spectacle – silence reigns in the streets’. Hezekiah Niles in his Register reported that a Philadelphia committee found that employment in thirty industries studied declined ‘from 9672 in 1816 to 2137 in 1819; weekly wages were down from $58,000 to $12,000’, and Niles himself estimated that in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore some 50,000 were ‘either unemployed or irregularly employed’. Niles also reported that in Philadelphia ‘houses which rented for 1,200 dollars, now rent for 450 dollars, fuel which costs 12 dollars, now costs 4 1/2; beef 25 cents now 8 cents; other things in proportion’. From Pittsburgh a citizens’ committee ‘stated that certain manufacturing and mechanical trades in their city and its vicinity, which employed 1960 persons in 1815, employed only 672 in 1819’. And, in Virginia, as in virtually every corner of the Union, property had depreciated dramatically. For example, in Richmond where ‘the spirit of land speculation’ had been rife, a new town had been ‘laid off on paper above the city, called the town of Sidney’. At the outset, ‘land sold readily for one thousand dollars per acre’. Once hard times began, such land would not ‘bring one hundred’.

Macroeconomic Overview

The young nation's ‘traumatic awakening to the capitalist reality of boom-and-bust’ reported by these various sources was a complex combination of financial market volatility, swings in international market demand, and federal government financial activity.

As the year 1821 drew to a close, a meeting of the citizens of Norfolk overwhelmingly passed a series of resolutions regarding the ‘pernicious’ effects of Congressional actions in 1818 and 1820 that closed American ports to British ships. ‘Destroying our commerce, and injuring all classes of our citizens’, these navigation acts, according to the resolutions, were ‘operating most unequally and partially upon different sections and portions of the Union, burdening the products of agriculture in a fruitless attempt to promote the shipping interest, diminishing the revenue, and threatening, in the issue, to produce many great and lasting evils to the whole nation’. The economic crisis that led Norfolk's citizens to take action resulted from the combined effects of the American Navigation Acts to which the resolutions were directed and the more general impacts of the new nation's first modern business cycle, the Panic of 1819.

A few years before, in early February 1815, a banner in the Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger carried the ‘glorious news’ of peace ending the War of 1812, brought in fifty hours from New York by the schooner James Lawrence. That night, the mayor ‘recommended’ an illumination that was, according to the following Saturday's press, ‘more general than ever we saw’. To celebrate the peace in Richmond, Mayor Thomas Wilson ordered an illumination for 1 March. ‘The Capital and all the houses of the town were illuminated … and there was a mile long procession of soldiers and citizens carrying transparencies.’ Although the word of a peace treaty brought joy to Virginians and enabled the frigate Constellation, blockaded in Norfolk since early in 1813, to sail for New York, it did not erase the concern of some for the future of Virginia's export-based agricultural economy. As a Norfolk editorial regarding the treaty indicated, ‘In a commercial view we have gained nothing; for commerce is not even noticed, nor indeed was it to be expected, that commercial objects would be embedded in a treaty of peace and amity’. With the peace, a more rigorous enforcement of British navigation acts restricted the entry of American goods and vessels to British colonial ports, particularly in the West Indies.

Walking the famed Boardwalk on a gorgeous summer evening in 2007, the liveliness and diversity of attractions was impossible to miss. Above the now-shuttered Sands's ‘People Mover’ moving sidewalk, a brilliant purple billboard implored Boardwalk denizens to wait a few years for the Pinnacle casino to open, and indicated that the advertisement was approved by the mislabelled ‘New Jersey Gaming Commission’. At the Boardwalk junction of Trump Plaza and Caesar's, a young rock band filmed a video. The souvenir stands, hot dog counters, pizza joints, fortune-telling stands and garish clothes stores did brisk business, as they always did on warm summer nights. Yet, now some of them looked different than they had ten years earlier, when I had first experienced Atlantic City: their canvas awnings had been replaced by stucco and brick facades with cupolas on their roofs, a CRDA sign here and there taking credit for the improvements. Parts of the Boardwalk were in the midst of a major facelift and it seemed poised, even eager for a more radical makeover. Now, the Pier at Caesar's was open, and walking through it one experienced something very different from the Boardwalk. The Pier had smooth, glowing aisles, elegant restaurants and lounges upstairs, a coordinated music-light show, and a multi-layered candy store teeming with families designing customized candy bars and learning about candy through the ages. The Pier opened in 2006, no less opulent than advertised, though two years behind schedule. Was this the new Atlantic City? Would the candy store still be here in five years, or would it go the way of so many non-gaming establishments that have come and gone during Atlantic City's casino era? Was this another Planet Hollywood or Ocean One Mall (its geographic ancestor), or would it last, would it remain commercially viable in the casino town? Would new stores like ‘IT'sUGAR’ or the Banana Republic outlet in the Walk, cool nightclubs and Borgata style, finally transform the casino community into the long-desired ‘destination resort?’

As always, the Atlantic City casino community is in a state of flux, heading towards the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Introduction

The concept of ‘nationalized insurance markets’ is a familiar term to all researchers of international insurance history. But how can the national character of an insurance market be defined? The dimensions of nationalization can be shaped by the economic competitive advantages of domestic insurers or by state intervention. Both circumstances have the same effect: the market becomes unattractive for international competitors.

Becoming a nationalized market turns a market almost into a black box. In the eyes of the international insurance researcher it is a kind of stigma. Understanding what makes a national insurance market specific is – generally speaking – not the subject of researchers' interest. In this chapter, with the example of India, I will pursue the specific structure of national insurance markets.

India is a very unique life insurance market. Its history is mainly distinguished by two periods: an era of juridical open-mindedness until 1956 and an era of nationalization from 1956 to 2001. In my opinion, the development of the specific Indian kind of life insurance experienced two stages: an economic shaping of the Indian insurance market during the era of laissez-faire juridical premises, and then, with nationalization, a political shaping of the Indian insurance market. They occurred at different times and had different effects. Both of them, however, are important for our understanding of Indian insurance and the structure of insurance markets.

Whereas it is generally implied in the literature that financial markets are global markets in every respect at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a different picture emerges upon closer examination of the insurance industry. Attempts by insurance companies to offer services abroad from their home base or to establish branches and subsidiaries in a foreign country face quite a few regulatory barriers. Most of these barriers originate from national prudential regulation, the main purpose of which is to protect safety and soundness, that is to limit the risk-taking of insurance companies, to guarantee the stability of national markets and to provide a safety net for domestic policyholders. The protectionist effects of prudential regulation result not only from the challenges of compliance with requirements that differ significantly from one country to another but also from the fact that international activities of insurance companies have been treated by national regulators with reservations if not outright hostility as they represent the biggest challenge to the control of domestic insurance markets.

In particular the cross-border supply of insurance services is severely restricted. However, the delivery of insurance services by a foreign company operating in the home country of foreign customers is also complicated by numerous regulatory obstacles. Attempts at establishing a commercial presence abroad face restrictions on foreign equity ownership, the number of foreign service providers, the type of legal entity required (for example branches or subsidiaries) and needs tests, among others.

Introduction

When Burton Malkiel (author of A Random Walk down Wall Street and a member of the Bellagio Group) wrote his analysis of the Triffin Plan in 1963, those working towards monetary reform were coming down strongly in favour of a multiple currency approach. The Triffin Plan, which had attracted so much initial attention after the publication of Gold and the Dollar Crisis (1960), had been rejected, but the arguments it raised against a world system dependent on the continuing deficits of a single key currency country continued to gain traction. These arguments had been raised before, fist by Keynes and later by Harrod and Kaldor. Their origins lay in World War II, in the rise of multilateralism, in the fear that profligate partners threatened the system as a whole, and in the politics of European nations seeking a common voice and greater leverage as a community of states.

This chapter deals with plans for a system of multiple reserve currencies at a time when plan proponents believed in an international monetary system anchored in multilateralism. They sought to restore confidence by providing additional sources of liquidity through a basket of reserve currencies, significantly limiting dependence on the dollar and the pound sterling.