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Export Instability in Historical Perspective: Further Results

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

John R. Hanson II
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Abstract

Today's less developed countries maintain that high instability in export prices is a serious obstacle to their economic development. History shows, however, that some of today's developed countries also experienced high price instability in the international markets they served when they were at a comparable phase in the development process. Current recommendations to institute a network of international commodity agreements for the most important primary products exported by the LDCs seem beside the point in light of this evidence.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 17 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1980

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References

1 The European Economic Community, for example, has put into effect a program called STABEX, which is designed to make funds available to the 46 participating LDCs when exports fluctuate outside a prescribed range.

2 Hanson, John R. II “Export Instability in Historical Perspective,” Explorations in Economic History, 14 (Jan. 1977), 293–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Cotton and wheat, for example, represented about 50 percent of the exports of the United States in 1880; wool and wheat represented about 50 percent of Argentina's exports in 1900.

4 A one-tailed t-test was used with the acceptable level of significance placed at 0.05.

5 Data taken from Imlah, Albert, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)Google Scholar and Lipsey, Robert E., Price and Quantity Trends in the Foreign Trade of the United States (Princeton, 1963)Google Scholar.

6 Table 2 also shows that a good deal of similarity existed between conditions facing NEDCs and LDCs in the late nineteenth century.

7 Data taken from Bowman, John and Keehn, Richard, “Agricultural Terms of Trade in Four Midwestern States, 1870–1900,” this Journal, 34 (Sept. 1974), 592–609Google Scholar.