Suchergebnisse

Au cours des deux dernières décennies, nos idées sur l'histoire économique moderne de la France et de l'Angleterre ont fait l'objet d'un sérieux réexamen. Les travaux concernant le poids de la fiscalité de part et d'autre de la Manche (Mathias et O'Brien, 1976 ; O'Brien, 1988) ont modifié nos vues sur la place relative de l'État dans les deux pays à la fin du XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle. Sans nécessairement rectifier les thèses bien connues d'Heckscher sur le caractère plus interventionniste et mercantiliste des gouvernements français en comparaison de leurs homologues britanniques, des recherches récentes ont infirmé les idées reçues sur l'importance de l'Etat et le poids moyen de la fiscalité dans les deux nations. On'garde toutefois l'habitude d'opposer fortement les deux pays au XIXe siècle. Ainsi persiste-t-on à voir dans l'Angleterre l'État libéral et quasiment minimal par excellence, doté d'un gouvernement discret, pratiquant le laissez-faire à l'intérieur et le libre-échange à l'extérieur, tandis que la France aurait eu une économie arriérée et, sous la férule d'un gouvernement dirigiste, se serait fermée aux échanges. Pourquoi une telle différence? Comment concilier ces points de vue contradictoires et comment comprendre leur origine ? Il est d'autant plus problématique de rapprocher ces interprétations que des travaux révisionnistes en histoire économique ont largement contribué à détruire l'image d'un échec économique de la France au XIVe siècle.

This examination of official commercial statistics suggests that the conventional wisdom regarding early free-trade efforts of Britain and France is wrong. French average tariff levels were, surprisingly, consistently below those of Britain throughout most of the nineteenth century, even after the abolition of the Corn Laws and before passage of the 1860 Treaty of Commerce. Previous scholarship has focused on French commercial policies covering a narrow range of items and has largely ignored the overall trade policies of both nations. This study moves us further away from stories of development and trade confined to a few "leading"sectors.

This article challenges the traditional view of French industry—that small, inefficient family firms retarded France's economic growth—by examining data for the French textile and flour milling industries taken from the industry census of 1861–1865. The evidence suggests that the average size of French firms suited the economic and technological conditions of the day. The industries studied exhibit constant returns to scale over a wide output range. France would not seem likely to have gained much from larger firms. This is consistent with revisionist contentions that French industry was as rational as that of other nations.

Traditional male-female wage discrimination measures rely on residuals from earnings functions that standardize for observable characteristics. But many productivity determinants are unobservable, and existing proxies for them are often difficult to interpret. Instead of using the earnings-function approach, we estimate production functions, using data from the 1839–45 and 1860–65 French industry censuses for textiles. While most of our findings cast doubt on the idea of discrimination against women in pay, they do not rule out some other forms of discrimination, such as occupational segregation.

We use census data and information on large firms to generate descriptions of structural features of Western industry around 1906. We find that although the United States conforms to existing stereotypes, most other nations do not. German industry stands out as having the smallest plants and firms and the lowest concentration levels both in the aggregate and when grouped by industrial classifications. Equally startling, French levels of plant size and concentration are comparable to those of the United States. We speculate on the importance of these results for rethinking the traditional analysis of industrial development in the early twentieth century.