What caused the failure of nationalisation of the railway system in Germany?: Malfunction of the German Imperial Railway Office (Reichseisenbahnamt) in the 1870s and 1880s

Ayumu Banzawa ()
Additional contact information
Ayumu Banzawa: Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University

No 12-18, Discussion Papers in Economics and Business from Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics

Abstract: This paper identifies the causes of failure of the nationalisation of the German railway system by the Imperial Railway Office (das Reichseisenbahnamt; REA) that was established during 1873-1874 under the order of Otto v. Bismarck, the first Imperial Chancellor (Reichskanzler). The REA was not able to keep railways in the Reich (unified Germany) under its perfect control as provided by the German Imperial Constitution. What impeded the REA fs mission? We must pay attention to the REA fs problems as an organisation. As the official documents of the REA suggested, the organisation was not free from bureaucratic inflexibility in both structural and personal matters. Furthermore, compared with the other railway administration bodies in Germany in the 19th century, I point out the REA fs incapability in collecting regional information. The REA, the central bureau in the German-Prussian capital, had no regional unit. Its top-heavy structure and the higher-ups in the bureaucracy did not collect the non-lettering information from those who were doing the actual work at each railway, and this caused a criticized edisproportionate emphasis on documents f. To illustrate this point, I focus on the failure by the REA in playing the leading role in compiling the first German national railway statistics.

Keywords: Railways; Germany; Nationalisation; 19th century (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N43 N73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-tre
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.econ.osaka-u.ac.jp/library/global/dp/1218.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osk:wpaper:1218

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers in Economics and Business from Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The Economic Society of Osaka University ().