Austria played a prominent role in the worldwide events of 1931 as the largest bank in Central and Eastern Europe, the Viennese Credit-Anstalt, collapsed and led Europe into a financial panic that spread to other parts of the world. The events in Austria were pivotal to the economic developments of the 1930s, yet the literature about them is sparse. This book tries to fill this gap. Aurel Schubert analyzes the crisis using the leading theories of financial crises, identifies the causes of the crisis, examines the market's efficiency in predicting events, analyzes how the crisis was...

In this reexamination of Canada's balance of payments experience under the gold standard, the authors develop and empirically test a new portfolio approach to the mechanism of balance of payments adjustment. This adjustment mechanism responded to massive inflows of foreign capital during a critical period of Canada's economic growth in the early years of this century. The authors show that the existence of international mobility of capital requires a fundamental revision of the price-specie-flow theory that has traditionally been used to explain adjustment when the balance of payments was...

This book reassesses Western Europe's miraculous economic recovery from World War II and the crisis of 1947. The contributors expose the role of international institutions and contrast the very different national experiences. Their historical analysis has policy relevance--to the debate over the Maastricht Treaty and the Single Market Programme, to the difficulties of adjustment in formerly centrally planned economies, and to reform of the Bretton Woods institutions. This book will be of interest to students of modern European history and to economists.

In Japan, as in other parts of the world, banking plays an essential role in economic development. Studying key industries such as banking provides an important tool for genuinely understanding a country. This book gives that understanding of Japan for the first time in English. It thoroughly documents Japanese banking during a crucial one-hundred years--from the opening of her borders to the world in 1859 through two world wars--from which the Japanese economy finally emerged as one of the most powerful global forces.