I. Introduction, 590. — II. Effective tariff rates, 591. — III. Regression studies, 600. — IV. Summary, 603. — Appendix, 604.

The role of the tariff in economic development in the nineteenth century has long been a subject of debate, even if much of the literature has centred on the political objectives and avoids assessing the economic effects. No less an economist than Taussig, in his 1880’s study, conceded that he, “… does not touch directly on the more important but less easy questions as to the economic effects of (tariff) legislation” (Taussig, 1885, preface), and in his Principles almost forty years later said: “The economic effects of this system (tariffs) it is impossible to follow empirically…more baffling is the task of following or measuring its effects on general prosperity” (1921, p. 539). Some historians too have been content to pass on in a casual way observations that owed as much to ideology as they did to empirical investigation: some noted that Free Trade Britain grew more rapidly than other countries and more rapidly than at any other time, while other writers pointed to the coincidence of protection and prosperity in certain countries. And yet the dominance of some variables together with the comparative data scarcity combine to make the task of identifying the role of the tariff in the nineteenth century much more difficult than is commonly allowed for.

The Impact of the Tariff on Some Selected Products of the U.S. Iron and Steel Industry, 1870–1914

Tariff Protection and Economic Performance in the Nineteenth Century

background

Could the United States Iron Industry Have Survived Free Trade after the Civil War

The British Tariff and Industrial Protection in the 1930's

In this dissertation, I examine the inter-temporal variation (course) and the composition (character) of late-Victorian British exports.
The first substantive chapter focuses specifically on Anglo-American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole inter-temporal determinant of Anglo-American trade costs. The determinacy of tariffs for Anglo-American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which I purposely reconstruct. I conclude that Anglo-American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth-century Britain.
The next chapter reassesses the empirical validity of the Ford thesis, which argued that a short-term causal relationship between British ex ante lending and British merchandise exports operated in the late nineteenth century. Using more recent data on bilateral British lending, I find evidence of a ‘lending-export loop’, with British ex ante lending preceding merchandise exports by a period of two years. A case study of New Zealand, which had an extraordinarily high share of Britain in its imports, reveals that the relationship was conditional upon the lending being allocated to social overhead capital.
In the final substantive chapter, I construct indicators of revealed comparative advantage for British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. In contrast with previous research, I argue that the manufacturing comparative advantages of late-Victorian Britain rested in the relatively labour non-intensive industries, and this finding remains robust even after controlling for human capital intensity. Furthermore, the manufacturing comparative advantages were neutral with respect to material intensity. While the share of inter-industry (Heckscher-Ohlin) trade in Britain’s total manufacturing trade declined throughout the late-Victorian era, it still accounted for the majority of Britain’s manufacturing trade in the 1890s.

The course and character of late-Victorian British exports

This study presents the first calcualtions of effective rates of protection for 1920, 1923 and the first and second half of 1930 for the United States economy disaggregated to 39 sectors. The calculated changes in the effective on the United States economy of the Emergency and Fordney–McCumber tariff acts of 1921 and 1922 and of the Smooth–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The results suggest that the Emergency and Fordney–McCumber tariff acts resulted in a much larger increase in the level of protection given to American industry than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Further, the results indicate that Smoot-Hawley had a small effect on the level of protection.

The Impact of the Tariff on Some Selected Products of the U.S. Iron and Steel Industry, 1870–1914

Citations

Tariff Protection and Economic Performance in the Nineteenth Century

Could the United States Iron Industry Have Survived Free Trade after the Civil War

The British Tariff and Industrial Protection in the 1930's

The course and character of late-Victorian British exports

Effective rates of protection and the Fordney–McCumber and Smoot–Hawley Tariff Acts

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