Electricity and the role of the state: New Zealand and Uruguay before state-led development (1870-1930)

Reto Bertoni () and Henry Willebald
Additional contact information
Reto Bertoni: Universidad de la República (Uruguay).Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Programa de Historia Económica y Social

No 19-04, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: The configuration of a “modern” production structure requires there to be sufficient energy supply at competitive costs to justify exploiting the corresponding natural resources. New Zealand’s better economic performance, since the last third of the 19th century in coal production and better natural conditions to generate electric energy at low cost –thus offering energy at low prices– explain, at least partially, the differences with respect to Uruguay. New Zealand's advantage in energy endowments facilitated the development of a dairy sector, certain energy-intensive manufactures and a more efficient use of railways that reinforced the differences between the two economies. However, endowments are not the complete story and the institutional arrangements are another relevant factor of differentiation. Our argument is based on the concept of endogeneity of natural resources and we use it to prove the hugely different roles of states in the creation and management of the electricity systems. These differences were not related to the extent of state intervention but to the achievements of such action. This action aimed at improving the welfare conditions in the case of Uruguay without paying enough attention to those aspects related to the production conditions; instead, in New Zealand, the productive development was the focus of the public intervention. The result was the creation of differential production conditions that explain the long-run divergent economic performance in terms of sector diversification and international competitiveness in favour of New Zealand.

Keywords: settler economies; endogeneity of natural resources; role of state; electric system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N50 N70 Q41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-his and nep-lam
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/20439

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:ulr:wpaper:dt-04-19

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lorenza Pérez ().