| 1. |
- Brolin, John, et al.
(författare)
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Environmental factors in trade during the great transformation : Advancing the geographical coverage before 1950
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Global History. - 1740-0228. ; 15:2, s. 245-267
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the study of trade-embedded environmental factors (land, water, energy, or material flows), three conflicting interpretations prevail concerning what happened before 1950. The 'great specialization' narrative argues that trade served to lighten pressure on the environment by redistributing environmental services from where they were abundant to where they were scarce. The 'great divergence' sees an exploitative transfer from poor countries to rich and powerful ones or an environmental load displacement from rich to poor. The 'great acceleration' dismisses flows as insignificant either way. We review long-term national studies and find an almost exclusive focus on developed countries, mostly European and especially the UK, where more systematic studies tend to support 'specialization' and/or 'acceleration'. By contrast, more qualitative studies on individual exports from developing countries often support 'divergence', but, since imports are excluded by design, this can never be demonstrated. We propose widening the geographical scope of long-term national studies beyond Europe and extending existing studies with bilateral trade, and suggest that 'developing country' trade be quantified according to existing methods of environmental accounting.
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| 2. |
- Theodoridis, Dimitrios, 1987, et al.
(författare)
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Trade and overcoming land constraints in British industrialization: an empirical assessment
- 2018
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Ingår i: Journal of Global History. - 1740-0228. ; 13:3, s. 328-351
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Land was an unambiguous constraint for growth in the pre-industrial period. In Britain it was 15 overcome partly through the transition from traditional land-based goods to coal (vertical 16 expansion) and partly through accessing overseas land, primarily from colonies (horizontal 17 expansion). Kenneth Pomeranz suggested that horizontal expansion may have outweighed 18 vertical expansion in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Taking a more complete 19 approach to trade, we find that Britain was a net exporter of land embodied in traded 20 commodities, apart from in the early nineteenth century, when potash (rather than cotton or 21 timber) constituted the major land-demanding import from North America. The vertical expan- 22 sion was generally larger than the horizontal expansion. In other words, Britain was not simply 23 appropriating flows of land and resources from abroad but simultaneously providing its trading 24 partners with even more land-expanding resources.
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| 3. |
- Van Zanden, Jan Luiten, et al.
(författare)
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Two concerns about the interpretation of the estimates of historical national accounts before 1850
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Global History. - 1740-0228. ; 16:2, s. 294-300
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- As contribution to the debate about the interpretation of the process of economic growth before the Industrial Revolution, we discuss two concerns about the currently available estimates of historical national accounts and the way in which these estimates should be interpreted. Firstly, we argue that estimates of the long-Term trends of economic growth should make use of all information contained in time series of Gross Domestic Product (GDP henceforth), and therefore use standard regression analysis to establish those trends. Secondly, we point to the problem that the time series of historical GDP are based on very different estimation procedures, which probably affect the outcome in terms of the level of GDP per capita in the period before 1850. Both concerns imply that we do not entirely agree with Jack Goldstone's views of pre-industrial growth. In particular, his conclusion that growth was cyclical before 1800 is inconsistent with the available GDP estimates, which point to sustained growth, albeit at a very low rate.
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