EH.R: I-O Models of the Age of Sail

Alan, Thanks for the reference. Bart Los, at the University of Groningen suggested Sarah Horrell's I-O model of Britain in 1841 and I've contacted her. I've recently examined her work. It's perfect for our purposes and provides us with the end state in Britain. Here's what I said to her and Bart as an explanation of our goals. We're working on I-O models that include government activities as a factor of production in the Age of Sail. We begin in Portugal in 1450 and end with the taking of San Francisco in 1846. We want to test current theories on the causes and effects of taxation and expenditures on exploration, trade, colonization, and conquest by the five major Atlantic nations: Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Britain, on both the home nations and the rest of the world. It's our hypothesis that Buchanan's tax-maximization theorem will prove to be the best predictor of government and private activity for all these nations. When looking for explanations of government action, we assume the government tries to maximize taxes subject to losing power for taking too much from the taxpayer. Governments like those of the Netherlands and Britain which could lose power more easily than the monarchies of Portugal, Spain, and France will have policies and procedures that better protect their tax paying traders and colonizers. Similarly, in the rest of the world, governments that are more easily tossed out of power will have different taxation and expenditure policies than those that are secure in their tenure. So, we want to explicitly include taxation and enforcement activities - both private and by government - in the model. The classic example is the armed merchantman - the Indiaman - and the cooperation of the navy in protecting trade. We believe enforcement will correlate well with trade, and inversely, trade will motivate the government to build a navy to protect the tax revenues from trade. Any help is appreciated. Jim. * * * * * J B K * * * * * San Francisco James B. Klein Lecturer in Economics San Francisco State University http://bss.sfsu.edu/jklein/ 415-338-7512 >