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Informed by labor economics and labor history, the economic history of labor markets is an alternative and unified approach to study the wage and employment relation. This broad field encompasses the nature, organization, and conditions of work, as well as the non-wage compensation labor earned. It is an alternative approach because, unlike the economics’ textbook model, the economic historian does not perceive the labor market as static. Rather, economic history provides a framework to examine the feedback mechanisms – the dynamic relation – between labor markets and technological change, business organization, government regulation, product markets, and the preferences of participants themselves. Put differently, history provides rich examples of the many margins of adjustment in labor markets across space and time, in addition to wage and employment dimensions.
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We pose a seemingly ageless question in economic history. To what extent did new entrants in the late nineteenth-century cotton-textile industry threaten the customary markets of the European core? Exploiting a newly constructed dataset on textile imports to Spain, we find that as trade costs fell, new rivals began to sell a greater variety of products. Along this dimension, competition can be said to have increased. In response, producers in Europe adjusted the type and number of goods exported. By 1914, specialization mapped onto endowments of skilled labour, capital, and access to raw materials. While firms in new industrializing countries exported low-end varieties, incumbents in the core shipped high-end goods, unit values increasing with levels of development.
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The postwar years brought many challenges to the Canadian economy in terms of trade policies. Indeed, in the years between 1945 and 1950, Canada experienced growing trade imbalances as imports from the United States market reached new peaks and exports to the United Kingdom decreased dramatically due to financial exhaustion caused by the war. These developments soon raised concerns as the country was faced with the prospect of foreign reserves depletion, a situation mainly caused by the productivity gap existing between the economies of the two sides of the Atlantic. The American sponsored European Recovery Program or Marshall Plan was met with enthusiasm in Ottawa as it intended to restore economic viability of the European markets as well as to establish a multilateral trade system based on non-discriminatory trade practices. The international tensions of the nascent Cold War were to limit these achievements as the need for a strong Europe dictated the elimination of restrictive trade practices between European commercial partners without giving equal treatment to transatlantic trade relations. However, the conflictual Cold War context was to offer an alternative strategy to the Canadian’s quest for dollars, for Washington’s collective security concerns paved the way to closer economic cooperation and privileged access to Canadian exports of strategic materials and other defence related commodities in the American market. The Marshall Plan was a key element of the procurement mechanism of the NATO country whose demand alleviated the pressure on Canadian foreign reserves through greater exports to the United Stated.
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L’Écosse du XVIIIe siècle connaît de grands changements qui seront à l’aune des transformations socio-économiques sous-tendant sa Révolution industrielle. L’historiographie sur le sujet est divisée entre deux visions du développement – nommées pour le bienfait de cette étude traditionnelle et révisionniste – à savoir si ces transformations valident la notion d’une « révolution agraire ». Cette étude propose une recension de ces deux courants et propose d’appliquer leur analyse sur une région circonscrite, l’Aberdeenshire. À l’aide de l’Old Statistical Account, source majeure pour l’étude de l’histoire moderne écossaise, nous tenterons de démontrer que le caractère particulier du développement des régions ne correspond pas à l’application des conclusions nationales. Nous accorderons une attention spéciale à la propriété foncière, à l’impact des enclosures et à la temporalité des changements. De par ses spécificités, et son retard de modernisation agraire et agricole, nous croyons que la région suit le schéma dressé par les historiens révisionnistes, c.-à-d. des changements structurels s’étendant sur un temps long et ne s’inscrivant pas directement dans la période 1755-1815, traditionnellement désignée comme « révolution agraire ». Il s’agirait plutôt d’une adaptation partielle et originale des nouvelles idées mises de l’avant par les protagonistes de la modernisation.
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The received view pins the adoption of labor regulation before 1914 on domestic forces. Using directed dyad-year event history analysis, we find that trade was also a pathway of diffusion. Market access served as an important instrument to encourage the diffusion of labor regulation. The type of trade mattered as much as the volume. In the European core, states emulated the labor regulation of partners because intra-industry trade was important. The New World exported less differentiated products and pressures to imitate were weak.
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Understanding the relationship between trade and growth is still at the core of the economics profession. This column seeks to identify the pathways by which globalisation affects economic growth looking at the case of Belgium in the decades preceding the First World War. It argues that the collapse in fixed export costs promoted the entry of uncompetitive firms into export markets and as the trade component of GDP rose, the share of high performing firms contracted, slowing growth.
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Belle Époque Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom. Exploiting a new granular trade dataset, we find that the number of products delivered abroad and destinations serviced more than doubled in less than 40 years. To explain this remarkable achievement, we study the relationship between trade costs and the intensive and extensive margins of trade. The establishment of a foreign diplomatic network that lowered beachhead costs and enabled the entry of new products was an essential fact of the trade boom. Interestingly, the expansion in trade in certain sectors did not translate into faster productivity growth. We offer some explanations.
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L’entre-deux-guerres représente une période charnière dans l’évolution de la pensée économique au Canada. Le contexte économique et social des années 1920-1940 est des plus favorables au foisonnement de nouvelles idées et de nouvelles approches. Face à la crise et à l’urgence d’en sortir, les économistes, les intellectuels et les milieux politiques commencent à se questionner sérieusement sur les dysfonctions du capitalisme et de l’économie de marché. Pénétrée par des courants émergents, dont le keynésianisme et le corporatisme, et en parallèle avec une discipline économique en pleine formation, la pensée économique évolue considérablement durant ces années alors que les économistes s’interrogent sur les orientations des politiques gouvernementales. L’étude des deux grandes revues d’économie-politique, L’Actualité économique et le Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Sciences, ainsi que l’analyse des travaux des principaux économistes de l’époque, incarnés par Harold A. Innis, W. A. Mackintosh, Esdras Minville et Édouard Montpetit, révèlent les nouvelles orientations face aux problèmes qui confronte le Canada.