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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Cooperative Extension: A Complex Organization, Nancy K. Franz, Lisa Townson
Cooperative Extension: A Complex Organization, Nancy K. Franz, Lisa Townson
Nancy K. Franz
The authors provide an overview of the Cooperative Extension System and its program evaluation challenges. Part of the historic land-grant system, Extension exists in all states and territories of the United States and is funded through federal, state, and local (usually county) appropriations, as well as competitive grants and other sources. Complex funding, staffing, and accountability structures combined with widely varying programs and delivery methods make program development and evaluation challenging for Extension. Although each state’s Extension service operates autonomously, they all share a need to communicate program impacts and public value, which has become the main driver for program …
Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss
Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we present new comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports in constant prices grew very quickly, but barely faster than population during the period under consideration. Furthermore, improvements in the terms of trade increased the colonists’ ability to buy …
Exports And Slow Economic Growth In The Lower South Region, 1720–1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Exports And Slow Economic Growth In The Lower South Region, 1720–1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
For the past generation scholars have emphasized that the Lower South was one of the most economically successful regions of British mainland North America, and perhaps the most successful. Planters, the primary economic actors, made extensive use of slave labor and created a successful staple-export sector, which by 1774 produced the highest levels of private wealth per capita in the colonies. Focusing on the rapid growth of the primary exports of the Lower South in the colonial period – rice and indigo – most scholars have concluded that standards of living for colonists in the region must have been rising …
Path Dependence And The Origins Of Cotton Textile Manufacturing In New England, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Path Dependence And The Origins Of Cotton Textile Manufacturing In New England, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
During the first half of the nineteenth century the United States emerged as a major producer of cotton textiles. This paper argues that the expansion of domestic textile production is best understood as a path-dependent process that was initiated by the protection provided by the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812. This initial period of protection ended abruptly in 1815 with the conclusion of the war and the resumption of British imports, but the political climate had been irreversibly changed by the temporary expansion of the industry. After 1815 nascent manufacturers sought to protect the investments they …
Conjectural Estimates Of Economic Growth In The Lower South, 1720 To 1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Conjectural Estimates Of Economic Growth In The Lower South, 1720 To 1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
This paper describes the first step in a larger project to build up regional estimates of economic growth before 1800 in the parts of North America that became the United States. In it we employ the method of conjectural estimation to develop new estimates of the rate of economic growth in the Lower South (modern day North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee) from 1720 to 1800 for both colonists and the Native American population of the region. Contrary to the widely held view that GDP per capita grew at a rate of 0.3 to 0.6 percent per year during …
The Challenges Of Economic Maturity: New England, 1880-1940, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The Challenges Of Economic Maturity: New England, 1880-1940, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
This paper provides an account of the complex changes taking place within New England in the years from 1880 to 1940. After 1880, technological changes and market shifts undermined the sources of comparative advantage that had promoted the concentration of textile and footwear production within the region and propelled regional economic growth. Despite the decline of these industries after 1880, New England's history after 1880 can hardly be characterized as one of economic decline. Regional economic growth did slow in the wake of these events, but the impact of this slowdown on living standards was moderated, by market driven adjustments …
Employer Recruitment And The Integration Of Industrial Labor Markets, 1870-1914, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Employer Recruitment And The Integration Of Industrial Labor Markets, 1870-1914, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The substantial shifts in the sectoral and geographic location of economic activity that took place in the late nineteenth-century United States required the reallocation of large quantities of labor. This paper examines the response of labor market institutions to the challenges of unbalanced growth. Based on previously unexploited descriptive evidence from the reports of the Immigration Commission it argues that employer recruitment was crucial to the adjustment of labor markets to shifting patterns of supply and demand. Because individual employers could capture only a fraction of the benefits of recruitment, however, investment in this activity may have been less than …