Des premiers énoncés de la loi de King à sa remise en cause [Essais de mesures ou fictions théoriques

Abstract

Abstract : King's law : first presentations and challenges. Trials of measure or theoretical fictions. This paper compares the first presentations of King's law by Davenant, King and Boisguilbert, as well as Quesnay' s challenge to it. These texts are examined from the triple perspective of 1. the measurement of the phenomenon, 2. the author's understanding of the structure of the grain market and 3. the validity of the theoretical explanation. None of these approaches are satisfactory on empirical grounds and only Boisguilbert and King actually introduce explanatory factors : the law of demand for the first and speculative behavior and panic for the latter. However, Quesnay correctly describes the effect of grain exports, in the modern period, his approach has been confirmed by the behavior of the Polish grain markets. Two theoretical annexes present the conditions first, for the incorporation of King's law into the modes of static equilibrium used by each of the four authors to describe the situations they studied and secondly, for the mathematical formulations implicit in their numerical examples. A third annexe establishes the relation between the type of models used in this article and processes such as the ARIMA which describe the evolution of the price of grain over time.