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

156 INTERNATIONAL TRADE as if they were the acts of God, so to speak, concerning which it is beyond human ken to find explanation. Sometimes they are referred to as if simply the result of historical circumstances. They happened so, came to be so; it is otiose to inquire whether they might have been otherwise. One outstanding merit of the abstract theory is that it does consider why the facts are so and not otherwise. It gives a reasoned explanation of the differences in money incomes between different countries, of the causes which make wages and prices higher in some than in others, of the bearing of the differences on the material prosperity of the exchanging regions. The theory may not be a complete one; it may not be even a sound one. But it does grapple with the problems, and is the only one that has ever done so. What has been propounded in opposition by critics has evaded the problems, constructed nothing.! These general remarks may be supplemented by some considera- tion, again very general, of the case in which differences of wages and prices are most conspicuous — the relations between West- ern Europe and the Orient. How far can it be said that these marked contrasts conform to the deductions of theory? How far do they serve as verification, how far suggest problems still to be solved ? Recall the general lines of the theoretical analysis. The case would appear to be one of differences in absolute costs; this much seems to be indicated by the great disparity between the money incomes and monetary standards of the two regions. India — taking this country as the largest of the tropical countries, and for so long a period the most important — has an absolute advantage 11t is surprising that, in the very latest German systematic compendium, so keen and well-equipped an economist as Wieser should fall into errors of the kind noted in this and the preceding paragraphs. He imputes it as a defect of the “ classical quantity theory’ that ‘‘ the value of money is supposed to equalize itself internationally by an automatic process. Gold, like every other commodity, seeks the places where it has the highest value and flows thither from the places of lower value.” And a further error is said to be that abstraction is made of the historical restriction to which individuals are subject — restrictions which above all affect human beings themselves and stand in the way of “an equalization of their culture in kind and in extent.”” Grundriss der Sozialkonomik, Vol. I, Theorie der Gesell- schaftlichen Wirtschaft, p. 433 (1914). Such versions of the doctrines of the Ricardian school are the exact opposites of their real content.

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