The economics of Edwardian imperial preference: what can New Zealand reveal?

In the Edwardian era, the British Dominions adopted policies of imperial preference, amid a period of rising imports from the United States and industrial Continental Europe. Hitherto, there has been no econometric assessment of whether these policies produced an intra-Empire trade diversion, as intended. This paper focuses on New Zealand’s initial policy of imperial preference, codified in the Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act of 1903. New Zealand’s policy was unique insofar as it extended preference to only certain commodities. Using a commodity panel regression, this paper exploits the cross-commodity variation in the extension of preference, but finds no statistically significant effect of preference on either the Empire share or, specifically, the British share of New Zealand’s imports. This finding is corroborated by an alternative empirical approach involving propensity-score matching

The revealed comparative advantages of late-Victorian Britain

This paper calculates indicators of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) for 17 British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. The resulting indicators show that the late-Victorian ‘workshop of the world’ was at a marked comparative disadvantage in a number of manufacturing industries. The paper then proceeds to identify the factor determinants of Britain’s manufacturing comparative advantages (disadvantages) using a fourfactor Heckscher-Ohlin model that relies upon these indicators. In contrast with previous scholarship, the manufacturing comparative advantages of late-Victorian Britain were in the relatively labour nonintensive industries, and this pattern became more pronounced throughout the period. The paper concludes with the observation that the factor determinants of Britain’s manufacturing comparative advantages appear closer to those of the United States than had traditionally been thought

The course and character of late-Victorian British exports

In this dissertation, I examine the inter-temporal variation (course) and the composition (character) of late-Victorian British exports. The first substantive chapter focuses specifically on Anglo-American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole inter-temporal determinant of Anglo-American trade costs. The determinacy of tariffs for Anglo-American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which I purposely reconstruct. I conclude that Anglo-American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth-century Britain. The next chapter reassesses the empirical validity of the Ford thesis, which argued that a short-term causal relationship between British ex ante lending and British merchandise exports operated in the late nineteenth century. Using more recent data on bilateral British lending, I find evidence of a ‘lending-export loop’, with British ex ante lending preceding merchandise exports by a period of two years. A case study of New Zealand, which had an extraordinarily high share of Britain in its imports, reveals that the relationship was conditional upon the lending being allocated to social overhead capital. In the final substantive chapter, I construct indicators of revealed comparative advantage for British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. In contrast with previous research, I argue that the manufacturing comparative advantages of late-Victorian Britain rested in the relatively labour non-intensive industries, and this finding remains robust even after controlling for human capital intensity. Furthermore, the manufacturing comparative advantages were neutral with respect to material intensity. While the share of inter-industry (Heckscher-Ohlin) trade in Britain’s total manufacturing trade declined throughout the late-Victorian era, it still accounted for the majority of Britain’s manufacturing trade in the 1890s

Anglo-American trade costs during the first era of globalization: the contribution of a bilateral tariff series

Previous scholarship has suggested that British trade was generally unaffected by foreign tariffs during the period from 1870 to 1913. This article focuses specifically on Anglo‐American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole intertemporal determinant of Anglo‐American trade costs. However, the determinacy of tariffs for Anglo‐American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which this article reconstructs. The article concludes by claiming that Anglo‐American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth‐century Britai