Abstract:
This thesis is composed of three essays. The first essay is a history of economic thought study of the ways in which empirically oriented economic historians have attempted to explain the causes of modern economic growth. The contributions of theorists, classical and neoclassical, are well known. The contributions of economic historians, with a few exceptions, are much less well known. This omission is unfortunate as economic historians have, in the main, remained closer to the data that they are trying to explain than mainstream theorists. Since the pioneering work of Colin Clark, Simon Kuznets, and Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, empirically and theoretically informed economic historians have attempted to measure, locate, and explain the causes of modern economic growth. This essay exposits and evaluates the arguments and methods used. The results have been mixed. The literature is characterized by the failure of empirical studies grounded in neoclassical price theory to explain the mechanism by which growth occurs. This failure has resulted in a return to searching for the necessary conditions required for growth to occur. The change of focus has been accompanied by a shift to increasingly comparative studies, and to an increasing diversity of methods. The second essay presents a real-wage series for New Zealand for the period from 1840 to 1914. Adding 32 years to the existing series, the new series allows a more complete understanding of the growth of wages within New Zealand and relative to the rest of the world. The key observation on the internal economy is that after growing at more than two per cent per annum up to 1882, the growth rate of real wages slowed to less than two thirds of one per cent from 1883 to 1914. In comparative terms, I trace the wage premium of New Zealand over Britain to the early 1850s. The premium peaks during the early 1880s, at approximately 50%, before declining to approximately 35% post 1910. Wages in New Zealand were approximately 75% of Australian wages in the 1850s, and converged with Australian wages no later than 1900. The third essay investigates the causes of the decision by British migrants to move to New Zealand between 1839, when New Zealand became part of the British Empire, and 1914. Migrants faced alternative destinations, most notably the U.S.A., that could be reached more quickly and at lower cost. Approximately half of the migrants received some combination of discounted passages, loans for their passage, employment guarantees, and land grants. Beginning with the insights of Hatton and Williamson into the general characteristics of the nineteenth century mass migration, this essay considers what place various assistance schemes have in explaining the decision of migrants to choose New Zealand as a destination. The econometric analysis suggests that the migrants to New Zealand were motivated by the same concerns as migrants to other destinations. Relative wages were important, as were labour market conditions. While the model is a good fit for the aggregate flow and the assisted migrants, it is a less good fit for the unassisted migrants. These results point to the possibility of cohort differences between the assisted and unassisted migrants. More generally, the essay highlights the impact of institutional factors on the migration decision. Migration is a path-dependent process; understanding why a migration started provides considerable information about the likely course that it will take.