Globalization and the Poor Periphery before 1950 (Ohlin Lectures) by Williamson Jeffrey G. (2006-04-07) Hardcover

by Jeffrey G. Williamson

In Globalization and the Poor Periphery before 1950 Jeffrey Williamsonexamines globalization through the lens of both the economist and the historian, analyzing its economic impact on industrially lagging poor countries in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Williamson argues that industrializationin the core countries of northwest Europe and their overseas settlements, combinedwith a worldwide revolution in transportation, created an antiglobal backlash in theperiphery, the poorer countries of eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.During the "first global century," from about 1820to 1913, and the antiglobal autarkic interwar period from 1914 to 1940, new methodsof transportation integrated world commodity markets and caused a boom in tradebetween the core and the periphery. Rapid productivity growth, which lowered theprice of manufactured goods, led to a soaring demand in the core countries for rawmaterials supplied by the periphery. When the boom turned into bust, after almost acentury and a half, the gap in living standards between the core and the peripherywas even wider than it had been at the beginning of the cycle. The periphery, arguesWilliamson, obeyed the laws of motion of the international economy. Synthesizing andsummarizing fifteen years of Williamson's pioneering work on globalization, the bookdocuments these laws of motion in the periphery, assesses their distribution andgrowth consequences, and examines the response of trade policy in theseregions.

Unknown Binding

First published April 7, 2006

About the author

Jeffrey Gale Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics (Emeritus), Harvard University; an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin (Madison); Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Research Fellow for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He also served (1994–1995) as the president of the Economic History Association. His research focus is and has been on comparative economic history and the history of the international economy and development.