Oeuvres complètes

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 836084659

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-28892

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Ricardo, David

Title:: Oeuvres complètes

Place of publication:: Paris

Publisher:: Guillaumin

Year of publication:: 1847

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (XLVIII, 752 S)

Collection:: Economics Books

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[54 ‘INTERNATIONAL TRADE zation of prices and wages; that, given free trade, the same rates of wages and the same range of prices must prevail in all countries ; that the flow of gold tends to make them uniform thruout the world. Another impression or belief, closely related to this, is that not only prices and money wages, but real incomes and the standards of living would be brought to one uniform level everywhere by unfettered international trade and international competition. Hence the uneasiness, even terror, about the “yellow peril”: a supposed danger that the teeming millions of the East will compete with the peoples of the West and reduce the economic conditions of all to a common low level. Yet it is elementary knowledge that countries trade with each other and that wide differences in wages and prices persist none the less. The most striking illustration is in the relations between Great Britain and British India. Here exchange between two large populations has been carried on for several generations In great volume, with rapid and cheap transportation and with com- plete free trade. Yet money wages have remained very much higher in Great Britain, and the general monetary scale has re- mained very much higher. Commodity wages, too, have been vastly higher. The same phenomenon, less striking as regards the differences in real and money wages, but more striking as regards the closeness of the contact, appears on a comparison between Great Britain and Continental Europe in the period that followed the adoption of free trade in Great Britain — a period of about fifty years in the latter half of the 19th century. The relaxation of duties, to a point almost negligible so far as concerns the present discussion, which took place in Great Britain about 1840, was followed twenty years later by a similar relaxation on the Continent. The Anglo-French Treaty of 1860 (the Cobden- Chevalier Treaty) led to a network of conventional arrangements between the important European countries, and brought about not, indeed, complete free trade, but a range of import duties so low that it could have been no appreciable factor in maintaining differences in wages and prices. Yet these differences persisted.

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