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

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part II. Problems of verification

Collection:: Economics Books

CANADA 233 plicated is the actual situation. It is complicated, to repeat, unless the borrowing country uses the proceeds of the loans at once and in full for purchases in the lending country; and this it will not commonly do. Doubtless some part of the loans which Canada placed in Great Britain were so used. But by far the larger part of the loans made by the British were applied by the Canadians to purchases quite outside of England. Not a little was used in Canada itself, in payments for wages and materials in the con- struction work of railways and the like. A very large part was used in the United States, but was “used” thru a process in which the loans were quite in the background. The proximate forces were simply that “money” was plenty in Canada and prices were high; in the United States there were goods of the kind that Canadians wanted; individual promoters, builders, contractors, traders in Canada found it profitable to buy goods from individual concerns in the United States. The goods which it was thus profitable to buy were partly consumers’ goods, such as were in demand by the Canadians — workmen and others — whose services were wanted in the construction and agricultural opera- tions, whose wages were high, who had plenty of money to spend. Partly they were capital goods, also wanted in Canada in connec- tion with these same operations. Money incomes and prices of goods tended thruout to be higher in Canada; here was the proxi- mate cause of the inflow of goods from abroad. Behind it all was the actuating power of the loans, not operating directly, but thru a mechanism far from simple. All in all, this episode has unusual interest. So far as I know, it serves to verify and confirm the essentials of the Ricardian theory of international trade more completely and in greater detail than any economic experience that has been subjected to scien- tific analysis. Not only this; it has a position similarly unusual as regards the methodology of economics. It is a commonplace that in economics, as in all the social sciences, we are debarred almost completely from the method of scientific experiment. We can never isolate a given force or set of forces, never deliberately and rigidly arrange that one alone

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