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Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.

This study constructs a comprehensive, internationally comparative set of foreign trade data for the period 1857–1875. The dataset is constructed using information at the commodity group-level and contains import and export values for the UK, France, the Zollverein, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, and the United States, itemised by trade partner. The study tackles three basic problems related to the heterogeneity in national statistics of the period: different definitions of aggregates, inadequate ‘official’ pricing, and the ‘proximity bias’, i.e. the misleading practice of crediting imports to bordering countries from where they physically entered, but where they did not originate. After passing successfully a consistency test, the resulting dataset contains harmonised and country of origin-corrected bilateral trade values for 7 central importers, 10 points in time, and 21 commodity groups, along with ad valorem tariff rates for all commodity groups and countries. They offer new detailed insights into the composition and evolution of trade and tariffs in the third quarter of the 19th century. Furthermore, a basic implementation of the gravity equation shows that as a consequence of the proximity bias estimates using uncorrected data are to be taken with care, especially when assessing border effects and the impact of policy variables.

Did the expansion of democratic institutions play a role in determining central government spending behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries? The link between democracy and increased central government spending is well established for the post-Second World War period, but has never been explored during the first “wave of democracy” and its subsequent reversal, that is 1870–1938. The main contribution of this paper is the compilation of a dataset covering 24 countries over this period to begin to address this question. Utilizing various descriptive techniques, including panel data regressions, we explore correlations between central government spending and the institutional characteristics of regimes. We find that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that democracies have a broader need for legitimization than autocracies as various measures of democracy are associated with higher central government spending. Our results indicate that the extension of franchise had a slight positive impact on central government spending levels, as did a few of the other democracy variables. We also find that early liberal democracies spent less and monarchies more than other regimes; debt increases spending; and participation in the Gold Standard reduced government spending substantially.

The authors seek to better understand the relationships between science production, national wealth, inequality, and human development around the globe.

The chapter uses econometric models, including Granger causality, to test alternate hypotheses about whether more economic wealth is related to more science or if more science leads to more wealth.

The immediate result of our models is that a country’s wealth contributes to the conditions necessary for productive science. While large countries produce many research articles in the STEM+ fields more or less irrespective of their per capita GDP, with countries like the Soviet Union, China, or India being important contributors to world science, the most productive countries were the richer ones. GDP per capita values are important predictors for higher numbers of STEM+ research articles adjusted for population size. Nevertheless, human development and income equality also have a positive relationship with science productivity. While the effect of income equality is less strong, it has importantly and steadily increased over the last 50 years.

This chapter is among the first to show that countries with similar levels of human development that are more equal in income distribution are more productive in science, while countries of similar wealth that are more equal in income distribution are not necessarily more productive in science.

Introduction: It is commonly observed that the ratio of food prices during the war times had become significantly more important than usual periods within the countries including Turkey, known as the Ottoman Empire that previously defeated in Balkans just before the Great World War. The scope of the study is to analyze increased or decreased wheat prices together with price fluctuations during the war period.

Aim: This study investigates the food pricing progress during The Great World War and its relationship with wheat prices.

Method: A model for the behavior of time series is applied to compare the important days of the war data against the timeline of wheat prices for British, German, and French. The statistical test named Holt–Winters uses exponential smoothing technique to encode the various values from the past and predicts “typical” values for the present and the future.

Findings: As a result, it can be said that wheat prices had anomaly patterns during the specific dates in war for French, British, and German sides. Great Britain’s wheat prices increased significantly on April 1915 when landings began on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Wheat prices in Great Britain and Germany dropped significantly just before on July 1916 when the first Battle of the Somme began. However, it increased in Great Britain whilst decreased considerably in Germany in March 1918 when the Soviet Government signed a separate peace agreement with the Central Powers. A significant increase for France was observed only at the end of this war.

In this chapter, I estimate French regional gross value added per capita in constant terms between 1872 and 1911, to better understand regional inequalities within the country and to allow comparison with other European regions. To this end, I develop a novel regional income estimation model, where income is specified as a function of shifts in sectoral employment structure. Its conceptual basis is uncontroversial, its data requirements are low, and it withstands robustness checks.

This chapter examines why the political collapse of Russia and Germany in the end of the First World War resulted in massive expropriation of private property in Russia and consolidation of private property in Germany. This historical divergence is explained by the different measure of coercive capacities of the provisional governments and, consequently, their different ability to withstand the assault of the radical Left during the periods of turbulent political transitions. The measure of coercive capacities was determined primarily by support of the army, which, in turn, was contingent upon the provisional governments’ decisions to negotiate peace and exit the war.