166
INTERNATIONAL TRADE
more so than in proportion to the money rates of wages. That is,
coal would be expected to be cheaper in the United States, at the
pit’s mouth or nearby. And such, as is familiar knowledge, has
been the case.!
In both commodities the United States seems to have a compara-
tive advantage, which, however, is prevented from having an effect
in international trade by the high cost of transportation. The
American coal mines, unlike those of England and Germany, are
situated far from the border and far from tidewater. Only as
regards Canada is there a possibility of transportation across the
political border; and as regards Canada, it may be remarked,
the phenomena are those of domestic rather than of international
trade. Were it not for the inhibition arising from cost of trans-
portation — the fact that brick and coal cannot be carried across
land and ocean as, for example, cotton can be — we should expect
coal to move from the United States to Great Britain, and both
coal and brick to Germany.
A comparison is made by Dr. Ballod for another commodity
which is chiefly domestic, even tho, like coal, it passes occasionally
into the international field. In breweries, he finds that in Ger-
many there were turned out in 1907, 614 hectolitres of beer per
workman ; in the United States (1900) very nearly 1000 hecto-
litres per workman.? The physical output was thus as 2 to 3. I
would not undertake a judgment on the delicate question of the
allowance to be made for a difference in quality between the Amer-
! By way of example, I give the following figures for the year 1913. The prices
are average (or rather representative) prices for that year as a whole. While they
can not pretend to any refined statistical accuracy as averages, they are quite
sufficiently accurate to indicate the relations between prices in the three countries
at that time. I have summarized them from figures much more detailed, which
were kindly supplied to me by Professor J. E. Orchard of Columbia University.
CoAL PricE r.0.B. AT MINE, 1913
Coking Coal
Gas Coal
Best Steam Coal
UNITED STATES
(Pittsburgh)
$1.65
1.85
2 50
NTA
7
|
GREAT BRITAIN
(Durham)
GERMANY
(Ruhr)
$2.75 @ $3.30 $3.06 @ $3.50
3.12 3.40 @ 3.75
4.00 d 3.50
2 Jahrbuch fiir Gesetzgebung, 1910, p. 283.
