International trade

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1758394757

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136209

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Taussig, Frank William http://d-nb.info/gnd/120199459

Title:: International trade

Place of publication:: New York, NY

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: XXI, 425 Seiten; graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part II. Problems of verification

Collection:: Economics Books

VERIFICATION. INTRODUCTORY 155 Great Britain continued to be the country of high wages and high expenses. The habitual standard of expenditure, the “cost of living” and what not, remained decade after decade higher than on the Continent. It is part of the same set of phenomena that neither high money wages nor low money wages, neither a high monetary scale nor a low one, count as factors in promoting international trade or in retarding it. An impression as common as the one just mentioned (that free trade must lead to an equalization of wages and prices) is that a country where wages and prices are high finds it difficult to export, while one where they are low finds it easy to export; and that, conversely, imports tend to flow especially from the coun- tries with a low monetary scale toward those with a high scale. The plain facts known to everyone are quite out of accord with any such notion. The surprising thing is that, plain and well- known as the facts are, the notion is so persistent. Goods move from the dear countries to the cheap countries, from those with high wages and great prosperity to those with low wages and hard conditions, quite as much as the other way. The money values of the goods that move the two ways are on the whole equal, the discrepancies being of minor moment and easily explicable in connection with the invisible items of international trade. The goods continue to be exchanged on the basis of an equalization of money values, decade after decade and generation after genera- tion, without check to their exportation from the dear countries or increase of their exportation from the cheap ones. Many familiar facts are thus quite in accord with the deduced theory; they stand as obvious verifications. Not only this: no other explanation of the facts has ever been offered. Commonly enough, even in pretentious books on economics, the variations in prices and money incomes between different countries are referred to as if they were ultimate data — a situation which the economist finds once for all, which he need not try to explain, and for which his only concern is with the conclusions or corollaries it suggests. Most German writers on international trade speak as if these phenomena were determined by inscrutable forces :

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