Introduction

Cuba in the mid-eighteenth century was striking for having a higher level of economic activity than countries such as the United States and Argentina. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it started to lag behind the rest.

Authors such as Coatsworth, Sokoloff and Engerman point out that the success of countries like Cuba can be attributed to the combination of a relatively scarce workforce (free and slave) and access to abundant natural resources. Landes adds that this led to the utilization of a large part of the territory for sugar-cane cultivation and the importation of all provisions – as tended to be the pattern in the plantation economies. Moreover, this type of societal organization led to enormous inequalities in income distribution and to the emergence of bad institutions which became entrenched over time. These are the elements commonly used to explain how the rapid initial growth was later stunted and also to explain Cuba's present-day backwardness. However, this type of economic specialization also led to the near disappearance of Cuba's forests. This is a little-studied subject.

Generally, the process of Cuban economic growth has been associated with two factors: the availability of cheap energy obtained from the forests (where the land was the cheapest and most abundant productive factor on the island, in relative terms) and the availability of a slave workforce during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These two elements defined Cuban economic growth potential along the lines of Boserup's bubble.

The government economist writing about the Atlantic City area's economy in 1978 for New Jersey's Labor Department could scarcely contain the good tidings after the first casino opened (Resorts International). Casino development had brought a clear energy to the region, measured not just in terms of early, stratospheric casino revenue, but also in economic rippling through industries such as construction and transportation throughout Atlantic County. From the otherwise dreary semi-annual labour report came the exciting news:

Things were changing along the Boardwalk, and this was for the good of the region:

On opening day, a line to get into Resorts stretched along the Boardwalk for blocks as the casino opened with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme headlining the entertainment. Lawrence made the first bet, a $10 play on the craps table, but did not win. That did not stop the crowd, which waited patiently in line on the Boardwalk with signs advertising ‘Waiting Time 2 Hour’ and the like, as they slowly made it into the casino. The Boardwalk line was six blocks long. Crowding was a problem for a city that only had 50,000 parking spaces, but expected 150,000 cars per day. Within six days, the casinos made a record $2.9 million. On 27 May 1978, the banner headline of the Press of Atlantic City captured the mood well with a sly double-entendre: ‘Queen of Resorts Reigns Again’. Now the action had really begun, and Atlantic City would no more be the place where, as one comedian joked in 1970, ‘Every Friday night we shop till ten at the supermarket’.

Women and the Family, Work or Poverty and Isolation

In 2006 Lynn Abrams raised the question whether despite of decades of research into the history of women the historical narrative still remains predominantly male. The image of women as the victims of male society can easily be added as an extra chapter while the actors in politics, economy, social development, organizations etc. are men. At home they have dependant, passive wives controlled in marriage and marginalized in widow or spinsterhood. Assigning women the role to produce new generations primarily, and measuring their success in ability to marry and remarry and lack of success in failing to do so has also been criticized by Todd and Pelling. These views echo those of Hufton in 1984 when in her article ‘Women without men’, she queried why women have been viewed primarily as wives and household members, not individuals, in family history research. While twenty years separate these statements the tendencies to discuss women as being in need of the protection of a man and assumed to desire marriage and remarriage seems to have persisted. The fact that papers produced in the last decade can include statements that ‘old women’ (as a group) lacked chances on the marriage market because they were ‘infertile’ and ‘sexually unattractive’, with ‘tendencies of physical and mental illness’, raise the question to what extent studies of women penetrate not only mainstream but even the family history and demography field.

Introduction

In current Central American historiography not much attention is paid to what happened to the region's economy during the First World War. The impact of the war is virtually unknown, other than that Central American trade temporarily shifted from Europe to the United States because of the naval blockades of the former during the conflict. For the period before the 1920s, no yearly GDP estimates exist, so in order to find out about the economic impact of the war, we need to consult other economic indicators. Fortunately, the five Central American republics published foreign trade statistics on a regular basis from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards. As the Central American countries depended exclusively on imported capital goods and fossil energy, we can find out the levels of apparent consumption of these products per country by studying their yearly import statistics. I will analyse the import statistics of machinery, energy, cement and foodstuffs. The behaviour of these different import cycles can give us indications about the economic performance of each Central American country, before, during and after the First World War. The aim of this paper is to measure the impact of the war and explain why some countries suffered a serious economic setback during the conflict, while others managed to benefit from its consequences.

During the nineteenth century, the Central American countries opened their economies to the rest of the world. Costa Rica started first with the export of coffee, followed by Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Atlantic City's casino experience is crucial for understanding the expansion of casino gaming across the United States between 1990 and 2007. The casino era in South Jersey wrought wealth and opportunity where very little existed before. Consequently, it represented a model of sorts for the new casino communities around the country, including tribal casinos, neo-riverboat casinos and the thriving casino communities in Mississippi. But the Atlantic City experience also demonstrated that simply opening casinos in a community was no guarantee of success, renewal or stability, despite the almost-certain money that flowed where none or little did before. The Atlantic City experience also provided an exceptional example of a careful relationship forged between local and state governments, local residents and the gaming industry, such that all would eventually achieve their major goals. Yet it took close to fifteen years for Atlantic City to achieve a moderately successfully government–industry partnership, and to some residents at least (albeit a minority), it never was very satisfactory.

The notion of casino gaming on Indian reservations took off in the 1980s when various tribes began offering high-stakes bingo games to raise desperately needed money for their impoverished people. This was not ‘urban reevelopment’ (the catch phrase of Atlantic City's casino era), but something like an attempt at tribal revitalization. Tribes like the Seminoles of Florida, the Cherokee of North Carolina and the Yaqui of Arizona sought to replicate the achievement of the Boardwalk denizens who won the 1976 state referendum that legalized Atlantic City's casinos. They looked towards gambling to improve their tribes economically just as Atlantic City and New Jersey had sought ‘urban redevelopment’. By 1983, approximately fifty of these bingo halls were open around the country, catering to middle-American weekend gamblers who competed for big stakes. In 1984, the Otoe Missouri tribe of northeast Oklahoma opened a 6,000-seat bingo hall and began offering games for close to $400,000 in prizes in one weekend.

In recent decades the number of multinationals has multiplied, so has the number of subsidiaries. There exists a host of studies on the historical development of multinationals. Most of these studies focus on the mother companies. Less is known about the development of affiliates and their roles within multinationals. This book has examined the making of a subsidiary, the Falconbridge nickel refinery in Kristiansand in Norway. As Falconbridge's ownership lasted for more than seven decades, the Kristiansand refinery provides an excellent opportunity to analyse business development from angle of an affiliate. Three main aspects have been scrutinized:

1. Subsidiary autonomy and corporate control, 1929–2000.

2. The development of the subsidiary's knowledge resources and innovative capabilities.

3. Falconbridge's adaptation to – and interaction with – Norwegian society and business system.

Subsidiary Autonomy and Corporate Control

If we go back to the ideal types of affiliates described in Chapter 1, the Kristiansand refinery has no doubt been close to Birkinshaws description of the independent subsidiary which operates ‘within certain HQ-defined parameters but basically free to develop the business’, as it sees fit.1 Seven decades is of course a long time. The content of these ‘HQ-defined parameters’ has changed as have markets, communication technology and the political economies of both the home and host economies. All the same, it seems appropriate to review how the Kristiansand subsidiary gained and maintained such a role and how the autonomy was exploited.

The 1960s were a decade of vigorous technological and organizational renewal. Falconbridge developed into a relatively diversified mining business, but nickel was still the heart of the enterprise and the cash machine that made other investments possible. However, the future of the Kristiansand plant was uncertain. As the reader will remember, Ontario's politicians had from the 1930s onwards tried to pressure the company to build a new refinery in Canada. In the 1960s it looked as if they were to succeed.

This chapter investigates how this external ‘threat’ spurned innovation and change at the Kristiansand subsidiary. Multinational companies often locate most of their research and development at their home base. Falconbridge was at least somewhat different in this respect. The Kristiansand staff co-developed a new refining process and pioneered new digital control systems. We will use this case to explore head office–subsidiary relations and the Kristiansand refinery's linkages to the wider Norwegian business and research system. The chapter also discusses the knowledge development of the Kristiansand refinery in light of Robert Pearce's concept of ‘creative subsidiaries’, that is, affiliates that actively try to shape their destiny and develop their line of business (see Chapter 1). He has focused on subsidiaries and technological evolution. One common feature of the creative subsidiaries is that they tap local sources of knowledge.

Energy may be one of the most contentious issues in the world and there are many discourses, narratives, explanations and arguments about the use of energy, including its role in inter-regional exchanges between the Middle East and North-East Asia. Increasingly, trade and energy exchanges are spoken together and this appears to be the case in recent works by Kemp, Simpfendorfer and Davidson. Narratives and discourses that highlight the inter-connectedness of non-energy trade and energy exchanges as an interrelated item in the inter-regional exchange between the Middle East and North-East Asia appear to be favorable to maintaining this inter-regional exchange. The bundling of energy and goods in trade and exchanges between the two regions acts as a form of interdependence through a spaghetti effect whereby greater intermingling promotes greater interdependence, analogous to spaghetti criss-crossing each other.

There are a number of centrifugal forces to mitigate the sustainability of energy trade inter-regionally between North-East Asia and the Middle East. Centrifugal forces may include increasing energy needs of the Middle East diminishing the potentialities of future energy export trade, for example the fast-growing Gulf states, their natural gas needs and their growing interdependence in forming regional energy systems. Regionalism is complicated and mitigated by growing inter-regionalism.

But because the two regions themselves are not institutionally regionalized and integrated politically as blocs, the inter-regionalism between the two regions remain organic, ad hoc and loose.

Government banks make sense. As banks, they retain competitive advantages because of greater client confidence and unbeatable brand names such as the Banco do Brasil. As policy instruments, they provide branch offices, automated teller machines and mobile services over cellular phones to reach citizens. Their staff can manage complex information about local needs, measure costs, benefits and risks, and assert contractual control to correct public policies before they run astray. Government banks provide large policy levers for political leaders and social forces. These institutions are often large enough to provide countercyclical credit to avert or ameliorate recessions. Federal banks may implement reforms such as privatizations and public sector modernization through ‘IMF-like’ conditional loans to sub-national governments. In the past, directed credit from government banks drove rapid industrialization in late-developing countries. Such policies continue in many emerging, transition and developing nations. But government banks do much more than direct industrial change. Government savings banks have served local communities across Europe, some for centuries, to emerge after liberalization of the industry and monetary union with increased market shares and renewed social mandates. Brazilian federal banks have also emerged from military rule, abuse by traditional elites during prolonged transition, monetary disorder and financial crises to shape development and democracy. Three big banks, a commercial-investment bank, a savings bank and a development bank provide over a third of domestic credit in twenty-first-century Brazil.