U.S. agriculture is a spectacular success story of high productivity growth maintained over an amazingly long period of time. Nevertheless, the industry today suffers from the same problems it has always suffered from: droughts, locusts, and market disruptions.
Relaxation of government restrictions on multioffice banking (interstate banking and branching by banks) in recent years has facilitated substantial consolidation of the banking industry in the United States. In this article, the author examines the impact of this consolidation on the presence of large banking organizations in rural banking markets.
One interesting aspect of the financial services industry is that for-profit institutions, such as commercial banks, compete directly with not-for-profit financial intermediaries, such as credit unions. In this article, the authors analyze the competition between banks and credit unions.
The authors provide, for the first time, an estimate of the real gross domestic product of Switzerland between 1914 and 1947. The estimate is obtained from published data on three other measures of Swiss economic activity during this period: net national product, industrial production, and the transport volume of Swiss railroads.
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