The terms of trade experience of Britain since the nineteenth century

Abstract

The terms of trade of Britain exhibited a declining trend in the first half of the nineteenth century. But after two decades of transitional confusion, they started to move upwards. The explanation lies in the fact that the reversal of the trend corresponded to a change in the structure of British export trade from the dominance of traditional textile products towards other manufactures. Unlike the traditional textile products, these other manufactures had little indigenous counterpart in the agrarian countries with which Britain had expanding trade relations. So while cost reduction through technical progress led to a rapid fall in the prices of cotton textiles under stiff competition at home and abroad, producers in the newer sectors did not have to respond much to this type of cost‐reducing technical progress that spread to these sectors in the latter period. Thus, as Prebisch and Singer argued, the classical scheme of distribution of the gains from technical progress through trade that was supposed to...