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

278 INTERNATIONAL TRADE Re Ri The same sort of thing may have happened in Adam Smith’s day. The “merchant” could sell to the English Government bills on his friends and correspondents abroad, and those bills would be duly met; the Government's remittances would be effected. The foreign drawees would be willing to bide their time, hold the bills or extend them, enlist their own business associates in gradually carrying out a series of troublesome but eventually profitable operations. In this case, also, doubtless it was the exportation of goods that constituted the last stage in the transaction. But that process of exportation set in gradually, had the appearance of being sporadic and uncertain, stood in no direct and visible connection with the British Government’s subsidies to the Continent. The economic historian may unearth one of these days evidence that will enable him to follow the course of these operations, both for Adam Smith’s time and for the Napoleonic period. The evidence at best could be only fragmentary and symptomatic; as indeed we have seen it to be for the comparatively recent and conspicuous epi- sode of the Franco-German indemnity. A suggestion of wider scope emerges. It is that not only in such exceptional cases as the Franco-German indemnity, but in others of more common experience, the underlying forces bring about their effects thru a gradual process — a movement here and a movement there, with cumulative pressure in the same direction. Specie rarely flows from country to country in great volume over a short period of time. So it is with goods; they ordinarily are exported and imported with regularity, not with abrupt changes one way or the other. When a sudden large movement either of money or of goods does take place, it is likely to be due to a temporary cause, such as a deficient harvest, or a financial crisis in one country not shared at the moment in another; conditions quite different from those to which we give chief attention in the theory of international trade. The long-run forces which are the more common and are mainly considered in the theoretical analysis take time for their operation. Specie is moving from country to country in small or moderate amounts every year, every month, almost every day. But sometimes the movement is preponderantly one way, some-

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