Foreign Trade and Nineteenth Century American Growth
Abstract
The American economy exhibited an impressive growth in the nineteenth century. There certainly are numerous factors at play in this extraordinary growth story. This paper presents a quantitative analysis which investigates the role of foreign trade in the nineteenth century American growth. To this purpose, the relationship between real exports, real imports and real GDP is questioned between the years 1820 and 1910. Since the American Civil War was an extremely important event in the American history we divided the period under examination into two, 1820-1860 and 1867-1910 periods. By examining causal relationship, we aim at investigating the existence of export led growth, growth led exports, import led growth and growth led imports hypotheses during the periods before and after the Civil War. While the results exhibit a strong evidence for growth-led imports in both samples, export led growth, growth led exports and import led growth hypotheses are supported only in the second period.
Keywords
References
- Referans 1
- Abramowitz, Moses (1989), Thinking About Growth and Other Essays on Economic Growth and Welfare (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
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Journal Section
Research Article
Publication Date
March 26, 2018
Submission Date
July 18, 2016
Acceptance Date
July 17, 2017
Published in Issue
Year 2018 Volume: 73 Number: 1