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SUMMARY:Sixty Eears after Fogel’s Social Savings: Measuring the Growth I
 mpact of Railways in the Periphery - Alfonso Herranz Loncan (University of
  Barcelona)
DTSTART:20241114T171500Z
DTEND:20241114T184500Z
UID:TALK222196@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:116791
DESCRIPTION:Some 60 years ago Fogel (1964) started a long-lasting debate o
 n the role of railways in US economic growth in the late 19th century\, wh
 ich was also a debate on the possibility of using the concept of “social
  saving” as a measure of the growth impact of railways in an economy. Hi
 s research was followed by a large number of works that applied the same m
 ethodology to other economies\, both in the industrialised core and in the
  periphery\, while Metzer (1977) and Crafts (2004) established a clearer l
 ink between the social saving concept and an economy’s productivity grow
 th. Based on this literature\, I have used the social saving methodology t
 o measure the contribution of railways to economic growth before 1914 in s
 ix peripheral economies\, namely Argentina\, Brazil\, the Cape Colony\, Ch
 ile\, India\, Mexico and Uruguay. My estimates allow identifying some of t
 he main determinants of the differences in the economic role of railways a
 cross the periphery. More importantly\, they also show the limitations of 
 the social savings approach and the difficulties of obtaining a single mea
 ningful measurement of the growth impact of railways for very different ec
 onomies and\, more generally\, of providing synthetic quantitative answers
  to complex historical problems.
LOCATION:Room 6\, Faculty of History
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