Lecture 13 - Feb. 20th, 2019
Britain's Repeal of the Corn Laws 1846
Gary Anderson and Robert Tollison, “Ideology, Interest Groups, and the Repeal of the Corn
Laws”
Reading Notes
Lecture Notes
For the midterm:
ID’s - Fill in a bunch of points about why that term has showed up in this class.
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Repeal of the Corn Laws
Domestic Politics and the Role of Ideas
- Cobden and Bright: classical liberal point of view
- Last class we discussed why the Corn laws were repealed from the perspective of a
classical Marxist.
- This lecture we will discuss why the Corn laws were repealed from the perspective of a
classical Liberal.
Britain’s Endowments in the 1840s
Britain’s Comparative Advantage - the mix of resources a country has in terms of what it can do
to make different products, etc.
- When talking about the endowments of the factors of production, we are not talking
about the absolute amounts but rather the relative distribution of these factors of
production.
, ^Capital : labour ratio is on the vertical axis
^^Labour : land ratio is on the horizontal axis
This graph tells us that:
- Britain is relatively rich in capital and labour, poor in land (relative to their other factors
of production)
- This is a reflection of accumulating capital and then winning the Napoleonic wars
- Britain was at the forefront of industrialization at this point
- Applying capital to make goods at a higher rate than elsewhere
- Who are we comparing Britain to? France, Russia, U.S., Germany, Canada
- These countries will be clearly less dense population wise than Britain
- ^this is reflected in content in trade
- What this graph is telling us is that Britain is very good at making manufactured goods
compared to other countries, that require capital and labour as inputs (except maybe
Belgium)
- What is Britain importing? Specifically goods that require a lot of land to manufacture,
i.e. agricultural goods (grain/corn)
Trade Preferences in Britain in the 1840s
How do we understand the impact of trade liberalization on domestic interests? Start with
Stolper Samuelson view;
- Applying Stolper-Samuelson: owners of relatively scarce factor(s) prefer protection,
owners of relatively abundant factor(s) prefer free trade.
- In this case: capitalists and labourers prefer free trade; landowners prefer protection
- Urban/rural cleavage (Rogowski)
- Rogowski described this as an urban/rural cleavage
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