International Competitiveness of the Antebellum American Cotton Textile Industry

Harley, C. Knick

doi:10.1017/s0022050700011396

Cited by 32 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Indeed, it was even true of US textile manufacturing in the 1840s (Bils 1984;Harley 1992), Catalonia between the 1830s and the 1860s (Rosés 1998;Thomson 2005), and late Meiji Japan (Clark 1987). Mexico's textile industry in the 1840s is eroded still further by evidence that he himself cites.…”

Section: First Best Principals: Subsidies and The Move To Mechanizatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, De-Industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism 1750-1879

González¹,

Galvarriato²,

Williamson³

2006

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Like the rest of the poor periphery, Mexico had to deal with de-industrialization forces between 1750 and 1913, those critical 150 years when the economic gap between the industrial core and the primary-product-producing periphery widened to such huge dimensions. Yet, from independence to mid-century Mexico did better on this score than did most countries around the periphery. This paper explores the sources of Mexican exceptionalism with de-industrialization. It decomposes those sources into those attributable to productivity events in the core and to globalization forces connecting core to periphery, and to those attributable to domestic forces specific to Mexico. It uses a neo-Ricardian model (with non-tradable foodstuffs) to implement the decomposition, and advocates a price dual approach, and develops a new price and wage data base 1750-1878. There were three forces at work that account for Mexican exceptionalism: first, the terms of trade and Dutch disease effects were much weaker; second, Mexico maintained secular wage competitiveness with the core; and third, Mexico had the autonomy to devise effective ways to foster industry. The first appears to have been the most important. Rafael Dobado GonzalesAurora Figure 1 and Appendix 1). This was a very big terms of trade boom, but Latin American experience was hardly unique since the increase was even bigger for Egypt, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), Japan, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the periphery.During the terms of trade boom, rates of technological advance and human capital accumulation were so modest in the periphery that the living standard gap between it and the core surged to levels that were vastly wider at the end of the boom than at the beginning. Whether the modest rates of technological advance and human capital accumulation in the periphery were caused by de-industrialization has, of course, been a central issue in historical debate since it all 5 started. What all scholars agree on, however, was that the terms of trade boom caused deindustrialization in the periphery through Dutch disease and other effects.This paper establishes that Mexico obeyed the same laws of motion between 1750 (just before the Bourbon reforms) and 1879 (before the economic changes of the Porfiriato began).However, the differences between Mexico and the rest of the poor periphery were sufficiently pronounced to allow us to speak of Mexican exceptionalism. The rate of de-industrialization was far less than elsewhere in the periphery, suggesting that there were local forces at work that distinguished Mexican experience from the rest. Section 2 places de-industrialization withinMexican growth experience over almost two centuries after 1700. Section 3 describes Mexican de-industrialization and industrialization over more than a century before the Porfiriato. Section 4 presents a three-sector neo-Ricardian model with two tradables (silver exportables and textile importables) and one non-tradable (corn) which makes it possible to sort out the role of external terms of t...

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Section: First Best Principals: Subsidies and The Move To Mechanizatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, De-Industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism 1750-1879

González¹,

Galvarriato²,

Williamson³

2006

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“…Since the interest rate -to the extent we know it after two centuries -was higher in the United States than Britain, other reasons have been sought to explain the capital intensity of American manufacturing. The tariff is one of the prime candidates (Harley, 1992;Irwin and Temin, 2001) I argue here that Samuelson's nonsubstitution theorem is important today to understand the implications of current government policies. Agriculture has long since ceased to the mainstay of the American economy, and I assume that the massive American capital stock is embodied labor from various times in the past.…”

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confidence: 97%

The Rate of Time Preference in the United States Government

Temin¹

2007

The American Economist

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“…In Table 2 16 Even if commodity descriptions in the two countries are seemingly similar, though, this does not always ensure that the price series are wholly comparable. A good example of how strict the requirements of intimate knowledge of quality descriptions and quotation basis are is given by Harley (1992), referring to the case of Liverpool-New York cotton price comparisons. One would have thought that the price of 'a bale of middling Upland cotton' was strictly comparable in the two cities, after being properly converted to a common currency, but this was far from the case.…”

Section: German-british Price Gapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Commodity market integration 1850-1913: Evidence from Britain and Germany

Klovland

2005

European Review of Economic History

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In a sample that contains annual prices of 39 selected commodities in Britain and Germany in the period 1850 to 1913 substantial evidence of well integrated commodity markets is found. The degree of integration is not universal across markets and varies over time, however. Absolute price variability was in general decresing over the period, indicating more closely integrated markets. But the reintroduction of tariffs in Germany beginning in 1879 implied that this trend was broken for a number of commodities. Nevertheless, once the impact of tariffs is accounted for, grain market prices are well synchronized. In contrast, markets for animal foodstuffs appear not to be integrated, which is to be expected given the existence of non-tariff barriers affecting meat and livestock markets. The price movements of non-ferrous metals, many textiles and some other raw materials are in accordance with the law of one price. The speed of adjustments of prices, measured by estimates of the half-life of LOP deviations, is a little more than one year, which is substantially lower than what is found in many other studies of market integration.

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International Competitiveness of the Antebellum American Cotton Textile Industry

Cited by 32 publications

References 11 publications

Globalization, De-Industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism 1750-1879

Globalization, De-Industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism 1750-1879

The Rate of Time Preference in the United States Government

Commodity market integration 1850-1913: Evidence from Britain and Germany

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