Search Results

The department of Supplies represented the apogee of centralised state intervention in Irish history, coming to control the production, distribution, and pricing of all commodities during this time of crisis. This is the first critical analysis of the department’s successes and failures and its impact upon ordinary people during this period. It details how a comprehensive system of rationing was implemented too late in Ireland, by which time the culture of the black market had achieved hegemony in defiance of the state’s periodic and often contradictory issuing of price control orders. It explores the ‘war’ on the black market declared by Lemass and Leydon and finds that this worthwhile assault in the name of the common good often involved dubious means. Charting the bureaucratic expansion of the state at a time of severe shortages, it concludes that ultimately, the ‘dirty war’ against ‘gombeens’, racketeers and ‘spivs’ came down harshly on small-time crooks and allowed large-scale profiteers to escape punishment. Explores the operation of moral and political economy at the time.

This chapter provides the ‘bottom up’ story of material survival during Ireland’s wartime experience. It reveals a comprehensive social geography of price differentiation, black market hotspots, and travel and retail disparities. While recounting stories of hardship has become somewhat hackneyed post-Angela’s Ashes, this chapter employs new oral evidence to convey the harshness of life in Ireland at the time, particularly in her western peripheries where the threat of starvation – one hundred years old – returned once more. Contrasting life in urban and rural contexts, it takes the novel approach of exploring the interaction of ordinary people with the state’s system of supply and distribution and reveals how an alternative system, or ‘moral economy’, operated in defiance of legal and institutional checks intended to ensure equitable distribution and fair price. It provides a case study of the operation of Irish co-operatives at the time and reveals large-scale black market activity across sections of society.

Economic efficiency is a criterion commonly used in economic analyses to establish an order of preference between different policy alternatives. However, in many societal situations where decisions on policy are made it would seem that this criterion is not the one most often prevails. This paper examines a disgust or repugnance factor, and examines how this factor operates as a restriction on certain transactions in the market and the consequences of these restrictions. This repugnance concept, developed by Al Roth (2007), suggests that some transactions, such as the purchase and sale of kidneys for transplants are illegal simply because a sufficient number of people find it repugnant. This paper demonstrates that the level of the repugnant reaction depends on circumstances and is closely associated with the social cost imposed by the development, prohibition or regulation of a kidney transplant market.

Chapter I uncovers little studied early stages of German division on the ground, showing that crucial steps for division occurred before the first declared establishment of border barriers in 1952. It underscores the weight of economic considerations and interests of the Allies and the practice of economic border guarding. The chapter shows that Western agencies were more decisive and effective in enforcing economic separation between the zones of occupied Germany. The chapter studies state agencies’ efforts to control smuggling and the black market via an analysis of the work and regulation of border-guarding organizations. It highlights the different paths of development of the official and unofficial economy and the tensions between frontier and state economic considerations.

The epilogue briefly traces the intertwined histories of the Baratillo and the neighborhood of Tepito in the twentieth century. Like many other decisions regarding the Baratillo, its move to Tepito was supposed to be temporary. Yet the market remained, and over the decades it grew into a sprawling marketplace for second hand, stolen, contraband, and pirated goods that consumed the neighborhood. By the middle of the century, Mexico City newspapers rarely referred to the Baratillo by name; instead, they used the same disparaging language that observers had traditionally employed to describe the Baratillo for the neighborhood itself. Today, Tepito is the most famous barrio in Mexico, with a distinctive oppositional identity that is inextricably tied to its role as the epicenter of Mexico City’s black market.

Arriving in the U.S., women interviewed recalled worrying about leaving their parents and lacking English proficiency. They were impressed with the continent’s size compared to Okinawa Island and with America’s affluence. Yet some were disappointed that their husbands’ living standards fell short of what they’d seen in Hollywood movies. During the late 1940s and early 1950s women struggling to survive and support their children in Okinawa went into black marketing of commodities from Army post exchanges. One interviewee married the soldier who had been supplying her. When asked what had initially attracted them to their husbands, one woman recalled that, while she had hated Americans after the war, the soldiers she met impressed her with the courteous, gentle, and caring attitude they displayed toward women. Another remembered Americans as neatly groomed, smelling of soap, and well dressed in crisply starched uniforms. Some parents vehemently opposed their daughters’ marriages, even threatening to beat or disown them. But they later relented with the birth of their grandchildren, offering material and moral support to the family. As of 2010 there were at least thirty-eight Okinawa prefectural associations in the U.S., most founded by the wives of American soldiers they had met in Okinawa.