TY - JOUR
T1 - Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Factor-Price Convergence
T2 - Were Heckscher and Ohlin Right?
AU - O’Rourke, Kevin
AU - Williamson, Jeffrey G.
N1 - Funding Information:
This is a much-revised version of a paper presented to the 1992 Cliometrics Conference. We are grateful for the excellent research assistance of Stefan Oppers, who collected the commodity-price data, and to participants at both the Cliometrics Conference (Miami University, Oxford, OH: May 15-17, 1992) and the NBER/DAE Conference (Cambridge, Mar. 14, 1992). In addition, we acknowledge with thanks Jeremy Atack, Mary Cullen, Tom Cullen, Bob Gallman, Claudia Goldin, Tim Hatton, Lynne Riesling, Don McCloskey, Ken Snowden, Alan Taylor, Gavin Wright, referees of this JOURNAL, and, especially, Peter Lindert. Research support was provided by the National Science Foundation, grants SES-90-21951 and SBR-92-23002.
PY - 1994/12
Y1 - 1994/12
N2 - Due primarily to transport improvements, commodity prices in Britain and the United States tended to converge between 1870 and 1913. Heckscher and Ohlin, writing in 1919 and 1924, thought that these events should have contributed to factor-price convergence. It turns out that Heckscher and Ohlin were right: a significant share of the Anglo-American real-wage convergence was due to commodity-price convergence. It appears that this late nineteenth-century episode was the dramatic start of world-commodity and factor-market integration that continues today.
AB - Due primarily to transport improvements, commodity prices in Britain and the United States tended to converge between 1870 and 1913. Heckscher and Ohlin, writing in 1919 and 1924, thought that these events should have contributed to factor-price convergence. It turns out that Heckscher and Ohlin were right: a significant share of the Anglo-American real-wage convergence was due to commodity-price convergence. It appears that this late nineteenth-century episode was the dramatic start of world-commodity and factor-market integration that continues today.
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U2 - 10.1017/S0022050700015539
DO - 10.1017/S0022050700015539
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:34547586896
SN - 0022-0507
VL - 54
SP - 892
EP - 916
JO - The Journal of Economic History
JF - The Journal of Economic History
IS - 4
ER -