American Exceptionalism as a Problem in Global History

• 成果类型: Review
• 署名作者: University of Oxford
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S002205071400028X
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 309-350
• 关键词: last hundred years; UNITED-STATES; labor-scarcity; Great divergence; 19th-century american; antebellum tariff; colonial origins; building trades; real wages; british

摘要

The causes of the United States' exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India. American industrialization in the nineteenth century required tariff protection since the country's comparative advantage lay in agriculture. After 1895 surging American productivity shifted the country's comparative advantage to manufacturing. Egypt and India could not have industrialized by following American policies since their wages were so low and their energy costs so high that the modern technology that was cost effective in Britain and the United States would not have paid in their circumstances.