Teorías clásicas del comercio internacional y sus antecedentes: de Aristóteles a Rybczynski

En un contexto internacional como el actual, en el que las pulsiones proteccionistas vuelven a campar a sus anchas, resulta conveniente realizar una mirada retrospectiva hacia aquellas teorías económicas que propugnan una mayor liberalización comercial como modelo de crecimiento económico. Desde los economistas clásicos y sus antecesores (Adam Smith y David Ricardo, entre otros); hasta los modelos planteados en el siglo XX (Heckscher-Ohlin o Stolper-Samuelson), pasando por ciertos defensores del proteccionismo; en este artículo se pretenden analizar los beneficios derivados de la actividad comercial enunciados por las diversas teorías en aras de proceder a su incorporación en las decisiones de política económica y, más concretamente, en la política comercial -tanto hacia el interior, como hacia el exterior- ejecutada por los distintos países o bloques comerciales.

Effects of Foreign Trade on the Economic Performance of Industries—Evidence from Wood Processing Industry of Czechia and Slovakia

As was first stressed by the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, international trade plays a crucial role in the growth process. The paper aims to analyze the influence of foreign trade on economic performance in the wood processing industry (WPI) of Czechia and Slovakia. The multivariate regression method (MLR), assumption tests for MLR models, and Granger causality test were applied to identify association between foreign trade economic performance, and indicators were formed to measure the effects of foreign trade at the industry level. The Granger test revealed the unidirectional causality in the Slovak WPI and bidirectional causality in the Czech WPI. The results revealed that the net export growth has a positive effect on the economic performance of the industry, but only if the growth in imports is lower than in exports. The balanced trade balance indicated no influence of foreign trade on economic performance. The paper contributes to existing knowledge with indicators for evaluation of foreign trade effects on the performance of the industry. The paper also brings new empirical knowledge in trade balance effects on the economic performance of industries.

The Long Rehabilitation of Frank Fetter

Economics has long history of “rehabilitations,” including W.H. Hutt’s rehabilitation of Say’s law, and Alfred Marshall’s attempt to rehabilitate David Ricardo. The rehabilitation of Frank A. Fetter should be as important as either of these, especially for economists working in the contemporary Austrian tradition. The historical records reveal that for the last century there has been underway a nearly unbroken series of efforts, especially by Austrian economists, to rehabilitate Fetter’s contributions and use them to revitalize economic theory. This paper relates this history, which chronicles the rise, decline, and rise again of one of the great American economic theorists. Yet crucially, this is not a story about Fetter alone, but also of the fortunes of the Austrian school and its rise, decline, and renaissance.

Introduction

This chapter describes how the book departs from the existing historiography that concerns the work of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. In short, the approach here is to focus on intellectual contexts and linguistic evidence. This excludes the usual treatment of these authors in terms of their methods and models, and it also forecloses the study of their work in relation to ‘classical political economy’ since this category is a retrospective invention of Karl Marx that he coined for the purpose of establishing his supersession of these writers. The implications of the general revision attempted here are far-reaching, especially in relation to the propriety of approaching past thinkers in terms of their ‘method’ and the nature of political economy as a vocation in the early nineteenth century.

Before Method and Models

Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate—and the texts with which Malthus and Ricardo attempted to intervene into these disputes. The results show that political economy was produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments, giving its practitioners great intellectual freedom. Yet political economy was also expected to act as a species of counsel to Parliament and resolve policy questions. In this context, the presumption of Malthus and Ricardo to style themselves as ‘theorists’ who possessed special intellectual capacities that set them above merely ‘practical’ writers attracted hostile responses from their contemporaries. The tenuous position of theory in this period was worsened by the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution, which enabled the enemies of Malthus and Ricardo to portray their work as theoretical enthusiasm—as the product of undisciplined minds that had succumbed to the pleasures of system, utopia, and fanaticism. The attack and defence of political economy in this setting was conducted with the vocabulary of theory and practice, and the period thus stands as a time when reflection on commerce and politics was conducted without method and models.

Ensayo sobre las utilidades

Mediante este texto, David Ricardo abre una discusión acerca de las ideas de Thomas Malthus sobre las teorías del aumento de capital y el tipo de utilidades, las cuales se aplicaron a los procesos económicos en la agricultura y al contexto de la Gran Bretaña de 1814-1815 respecto de las políticas económicas que se estaban llevando a cabo para regular el comercio de los cereales. De esta manera, reflexiona sobre las relaciones y las dinámicas dadas entre capital y utilidades.

OVERCOMING ABSOLUTE AND COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE: A REAPPRAISAL OF THE RELATIVE CHEAPNESS OF FOREIGN COMMODITIES AS THE BASIS OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE

David Ricardo indicated in his famous numerical example in the Principles that it would be advantageous to Portugal to import English cloth made by 100 men, although it could have been produced locally with the labor of only 90 Portuguese men. As the production of the cloth required less quantity of labor in Portugal, it has been commonly inferred that this country had a production cost advantage over England in cloth making. This inference will be proven wrong here by showing that the English cloth had a lower cost of production than the Portuguese cloth. This finding refutes the widespread belief that Ricardo had formulated a new law, principle, or rule for international specialization, known as “comparative advantage.” He used the same rule for specialization as Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. Thus, the popular contraposition of Smith’s absolute versus Ricardo’s comparative cost advantage has to be dismissed.

Teori ekonomi David Ricardo

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