International trade

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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

186 oy INTERNATIONAL TRADE the industry first was undertaken on any considerable scale, and where it has grown steadily, has some special advantages on non- irrigated lands. Nature has given to a good part of its beet dis- trict the required combination of climate and precipitation. These physical causes, serving as they do to give the beet sugar industry of the far West some degree of comparative advantage, have been reinforced by the fact that the competing product (cane sugar) encounters transportation obstacles in reaching the center of the country from the sea-board. Hence the beet sugar industry has here shown a great growth under the stimulus of protection. The growth is striking when compared with the absence of any- thing of the kind in the main agricultural region, which yet has climatic conditions similar to those of European countries where beet sugar production flourishes without any tariff support at all. It would carry us too far afield to inquire whether the net result is that the Western sugar producers are in a position to compete with other sources of sugar supply without protection. Apparently some part of the industry is independent of such support, but by no means all of it. These are questions of the balancing of forces, and concrete problems important for the legislator, which lie out- side the field of the present investigation.! The case is significant for our purposes as an illustration of the way in which the inter- play of physical and human factors combines to bring about or to take away a comparative advantage. Essentially the same sort of situation, and the same explanation of what at first sight appear to be anomalies, are found in flax culture. Flax being an agricultural article, one might expect it to be produced with ease and with success in a country preéminent in agriculture. Yet in fact it never was produced in considerable quantities in the United States, and it quite dropped out of sight before the middle of the nineteenth century — that is, as soon as the country entered on its characteristic agricultural and industrial development. Attempts to stimulate its production by protective 1 For an excellent account of various sugar producing regions, cane as well as beet, from which the United States is supplied, see P. G. Wright, Sugar in Relation to the Tariff (1924).

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