Depression and war : three essays on the Canadian economy 1930-45
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two main points histories of the Second World War in Canada traditionally emphasize are (1) the role of war-related fiscal policy in finally ending the Great Depression and (2) the success of government control over the economy. Potential output estimates show a large output gap still in existence in 1939, with it quickly closing by 1941. The Dominion government's war-related fiscal policy emerges as the factor explaining this rapid recovery. But Dominion fiscal policy was also important to recovery before the war. Canada's participation in bi-lateral trade negotiations, which lowered tariffs, the chief instrument of contemporary Dominion government fiscal policy, in reciprocation for similar concessions, stimulated exports, the chief source of recovery before the war. The matter of success rests largely on how well the Department of Munitions and Supply achieved the Dominion government's strategic aims during the war. Two strategic aims identified in this thesis are the government's desire to minimize the costs associated with war production and to avoid over-expansion in the iron and steel industry. Examining the production records of the Dominion Steel and Coal Company (Dosco), a primary iron and steel firm, and the Trenton Steel Works, a secondary manufacturing firm, shows how the government allocated production in a least cost manner among Canadian producers, consistent with the first of these two aims. Through its Crown Corporations, the Department also strove to minimize the costs associated with establishing war plant. Concerning the second aim, the government avoided rehabilitating Dosco's steel plate mill until sufficient domestic demand warranted it. With its capacity extraneous to the Canadian industry, the government closed the mill after the war. In contrast to the importance previous research placed on political factors in explaining the government's conduct of the war effort, this thesis argues that considerations production costs and input prices were a vital part of the government's decision making process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".