540.000 euro NWO-grant for research project into European Capitalism

Dr. Herman de Jong of the FEB was granted more than half a million euro's by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The research project's title is:Modern Times. European Capitalism in the Second Industrial Revolution 1900-1950. The €540.000 will be spent on the appointment of two PhD-students and a postdoc.

 

De Jong is scientific director of the N.W. Posthumus Instituut at the FEB. This is the Netherlands research institute and research school for economic and social history.

 

The project

Characteristic of the present 'third industrial revolution of information and communication technologies' is that the advent of the knowledge economy so far has created much larger welfare gains in the United States as compared to Europe. In fact, hundred years ago, by the start of the twentieth century, Europe faced a similar situation; during the second revolution of electrification/motorisation. That time the European economy was also outperformed by the United States, especially in manufacturing and market services.

Existing theories and approaches explaining this gap are based on quantitative evidence for the total economy (such as relative prices of labour and capital, resource endowments or the size of the market) or look at economic behaviour of individual companies. The present study of dr. Herman de Jong's group however, concentrates on the comparative study of sectors, and aims to build a bridge between the vicissitudes of individual companies and the performance of the total economy.

 

The study analyses the sectoral composition and sectoral growth in the European economies to explain the nature of the welfare gap between Europe and the technology leader, the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. What were the reasons why Europe lost track, can we identify in what technologies or industries this became visible, and how can we account for the effects of the world wars and the Great Depression? The strength of a systematic comparative approach is that it provides the instruments to overcome the traditional fragmentation and myopia of economic histories focused on one nation only. The strategic aim of the project is to create a transnational research infrastructure for the comparative study of European economies.

More information

Dr. Herman de Jong, www.rug.nl/staff/h.j.de.jong/index