Sweden's iron ore exports to Germany, 1933–1944

Abstract

Rolf Karlbom's article about Swedish iron ore exports to Germany during the Nazi era¹ is an attempt to examine a very important problem as yet unsolved—the significance of the Swedish ore deliveries to Germany. His study begins with the following two questions:² 1. ‘How much of the total consumption of this raw material by German industry did Swedish ore cover during these years?’

2. ‘How far was access to Swedish iron ore a sine qua non for the continuance of the armaments programme?’

3. These basic questions indicate the main problems. Karlbom's answers to them are not wholly convincing because of some weaknesses in his approach.

     

Bilateral political relations,space spillovers and the import expansion of China’s bulk commodity

The stability of bulk commodities imports is crucial to the development and stability of the country’s economy. Because its political attribute is more significant than other commodities, the trade of bulk commodities is more easily affected by bilateral political relations. However, there are only few studies examine the impact of political relations between countries and their spatial spillovers on bulk commodities’ imports. Based on “United Nations (UN) Voting General Assembly Voting Data” and “China Import and Export Statistics Data” from 1996 to 2014, this paper empirically examines the influence of the spatial spillover of China’s political relations with countries other than potential importing countries on the import expansion of China’s bulk commodity from the potential importing country. The results show that the improvement of bilateral political relations between China and other countries has a negative spatial spillover effect on the import of bulk commodities. However, this negative effect will be changed as China starts to establish a sound bilateral political relation with the potential importing country. Meanwhile, the more significant the political attributes of commodities, the greater the negative effect of spatial spillover. The import expansion of commodities with significant political attributes requires an improvement in direct bilateral relations.     

Forest endowment,logging restrictions,and China's wood products trade

This paper uses the gravity model to investigate determinants of China's wood products trade from 1995 to 2004. The results suggest that trade partners' forest resource endowment and China's own logging restrictions policy affect its wood products imports and exports. China's exported wood products are shown to be inferior goods while China's imported wood products are labor intensive for the exporting countries. Due to rises in Chinese currency against other major currency, transportation costs, and foreign trade actions, China's wood products exports and imports may slow down. The results may have implications on trade and global forest resource conservation.     

The reliability of the english port books

Abstract

Modem trade statistics start with the series of English customs ledgers from 1696 onwards. The French ledgers of imports and exports follow twenty years later, the Swedish series (including Finland) begins in 1738, and the Scottish one in the 1750s.1 For other European countries they are even more recent. This means that before 1700 we have to rely on the customs books of various individual ports, except in occasional cases where reliable (or unreliable) compilations for a particular year, a commodity or an area are preserved. Of the latter, a Scottish historian, T. C. Smout, has recently written: ‘Customs books are an invaluable source for the historian of trade. In them he may discover the commodities exported and imported, he may read the names of ships, skippers and merchants, he may learn where they were bound and whence they came, and from them he may perhaps judge which places within the realm had the greatest traffic with foreign parts. Given a sufficiently long and unbroken series of customs material, he may be tempted to cull statistics about these and other matters. This, however, is a dangerous practice, for the books of the seventeenth century were designed merely as a record of dues paid to the Crown, and were not meant, like modern Board of Trade returns, as a mirror of commercial trends or as a register of the volume and value of goods passing in and out of the country.’²     

The growth and decline of import substitution in Brazil — revisited

Of all developing economies, Brazil in the early 1960s represented the most spectacular case of import substitution (IS) which, it was thought, had reached its final or ‘declining’ phases. This paper re-examines the theories of that period by applying econometric techniques to input-output and extended time series data.We trace the progress and regression of IS through different circuits and find the process to be reversible. Second, we find a dialectical relationship between the creation of inter-industry linkages and their destruction through leakages which undermine IS. Third, we identify a dialectical relationship between the ‘substitution of imports’ and the ‘importation of substitutes’, that is, the continual invasion of new imports which displace local products and create the need for IS, such as wheat substituting for tropical foods, plastics for woods and synthetic fibres for cotton.     

Birgit Karlsson,Egenintresse eller samhällsintresse,Nazityskland och svensk skogsindustri 1933–1945

Abstract

In Vol. XV (1967) of this journal, Alan S. Milward and Jorg-Jöhannes Jäger published criticisms of my article on Swedish iron are exports to Nazi Germany.¹ Turning first to Milward's contribution, this is based on the assumption that the German economy was a ‘blitzkrieg war economy’ in the period preceding the attack upon the Soviet Union. This view, which has been expressed before by B. H. Klein, undoubtedly brings a number of valuable refinements into the hitherto exaggerated estimates of the level of German armaments at the outbreak of the Second World War.² But when he goes on to say that ‘in such a war economy all considerations of potential armaments-producing capacity were rejected in favour of present armaments-producing capacity’,³ Milward palpably oversimplifies a complex problem. In fact, the demand for an armaments programme ‘in depth’, to quote General Thomas, did make itself heard long before the autumn of 1941.     

Population mobility in the Netherlands 1880–1910. A case study of Wisch in the Achterhoek

Abstract

In the last two decades, migration as 3. phenomenon has been studied intensively and scientifically. Apart from migration in general, Scandinavian scholars have taken a special interest in the great flood of emigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A large number of dissertations and other studies have described and analysed the phenomenon. Samson's work on emigration and mobility must be seen in this context, having started as a dissertation within the project ‘Sweden and America after 1860’, commonly referred to as the Emigration Research Project.¹     

The ‘price revolution’ of the sixteenth century: Some Swedish evidence

Abstract

Since the publication in 1895 of George Wiebe's work, Zur Geschichte der Preisreuolution des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, ¹ the ‘price revolution’ has been a generally accepted concept found in most historical textbooks. By the ‘price revolution’, Wiebe meant the general rise in commodity prices which occurred in western Europe during the 16th century, the primary cause of which according to him was the influx of silver from the new Spanish possessions in America. His explanation also came to be generally accepted, but perhaps an even more significant contribution to the influence which this book has wielded is the fact that he synthesized in readily usable form the price analyses in existence when he wrote, i.e. at the end of the 19th century. In the 1930s his tables still formed the basis of sweeping conclusions and generalizations.     

A 1735 Danish tract on economic policy

Abstract

About 1720 nearly all Western European countries experienced a monetary expansion which manifested itself most strongly in John Law's banking in France and the English ‘South Sea Bubble’. The same trend was in evidence in the Danish Monarchy; during the last years of the Northern War bank notes (‘kurantsedler’) equivalent to about one million rix-dollars were issued to meet the substantial military expenses.     

Serfdom in esthonia during the period of Swedish rule

Abstract

For quite some time after World War II peasant behavior in less developed countries was ‘unproblematic’. There was a general consensus that peasants were not ‘economic men’, in the sense that they tried to maximize profits as postulated by mainstream economic theory. Instead, their acts were assumed to be governed by ‘tradition’, or ‘conservatism’, which by and large had nothing to do with the type of maximizing or minimizing behavior which acquired prominence in economic theory not least by the central role that was conferred on it in Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis.¹ Their ambitions and horizons were thought to be limited in such a way as to render standard economic theory inapplicable in the study of peasant behavior. The discussion focused on the ‘inert’, or ‘lazy’, (satisficing) peasant.²     

Swedish imperialism under the microscope

Abstract

Interest in Sweden's Age of Greatness was keen among historians in Sweden and Finland from 1870 until as late as 1970. Apart from the extensive studies written by C.T. Odhner and F.F. Carlson, a whole succession of Swedish scholars defended dissertations on such minor issues as Sweden's relations with ‘such and such a country’ during ‘such and such years’ in order to qualify for positions as lecturers. At the same time, literature with a more geopolitical leaning was appearing, such as the works by Harald Hjärne and Eirik Hornborg on Sweden-Finland's eastern problem.¹     

Swedish foreign trade in the mid-sixteenth century

Abstract

For many years our image of economic conditions in 16th-century Sweden has been that depicted by Eli F. Heckscher: a medieval economy, reorganised by a central government of increasing authority in the person of King Gustav Vasa, and gradually transformed after his death in 1560. Sweden's foreign trade appeared to Heckscher as a particular example of his general rule. Its role in the national economy as a whole was very small: such commodities as were imported in exchange for exports were for the most part luxury goods; the only notable exception was the import of salt, to which Heckscher assigned extreme importance, because a vast consumption of salted food featured in his concept of the Swedish ‘medieval’ pattern of overall consumption. Heckscher saw no reason to postulate any major changes in the form and direction of Swedish trade during the reign of Gustav Vasa himself (1521–60); on the contrary, a theme vigorously argued in his book is that the political liberation of Sweden from the influence of Liibeck in the 1530s did not produce any shift of trade routes: most Swedish foreign trade still went via Lübeck. The customs ledgers of a single year, 1559, had an important influence on Heckscher's views.     

Book Review

Abstract

The importance of Swedish iron ore to the re-armament and wartime economy of Nazi Germany has been touched upon in a number of writings about the international politics of the period here under review. Erik Lonnroth has demonstrated how the question of continued ore deliveries constituted the flashpoint of Swedish-German relations during the 1930s.¹ Gunnar Häggläf describes the Swedish Foreign Office's balancing act between English and German desires in regard to the ore trade, and their role in the regulating of trade with the two belligerents in the autumn of 1939.² Magne Skodvin has explored the strategic and economic aspects of the attack on Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940.³     

Technical change and the ‘technology’ myth

Abstract

In recent years, historians and other English-speaking commentators on technical change and technical functions have often chosen to discuss these matters under the heading ‘technology’. Thus, there have been discussions about such matters as ‘echnological innovation’, ‘technological invention’, and even ‘the imperatives of technology’, ‘the technostructure’ and ‘technological drivenness’.¹ One economist with a special interest in historical matters, Kuznets, has virtually defined a separable condition of ‘modernity’ as the era of ‘technology’ — ‘The epochal innovation that distinguishes the modern economic epoch is the extended application of science to problems of economic production’ alternatively, it is ‘the utilization of a potential provided by modern technology’. An economic historian (Musson) has it that ‘applied science is … the major force behind modern economic growth’. And a prominent historian of the so-called ‘technology’, Forbes, has argued that in ‘our modern world both technology and engineering are branches of applied science’.²     

Some aspects of the impact of inflation on the debt burden of developing countries

The effect of inflation on the external indebtedness of developing countries is examined in this UNCTAD paper in a more comprehensive framework than is usually the case. The conventional view on this has been that international inflation reduces the ‘real’ burden of external debt. However, viewed in the context of the net effect of inflation on the import capacity of debtor developing countries, the paper shows that the situation is by no means so simple. It demonstrates by examining the cases of a sample of 71 developing countries that the effect of price increases of developing countries' imports (relative to price increases for their exports) caused by international inflation can and often has more than offset the so-called favourable effect on the burden of debt. For example in 1975, a year with particularly high inflation, no less than 75% in the sample experienced negative consequences. In these cases, therefore, international inflation on balance has reduced import capacity and thus made it more not less difficult for them to maintain servicing on their external debt and so increased the ‘real’ burden of their debt. Thus the UNCTAD paper brings into serious question the conventional wisdom on this important issue.     

Den egna vägen: Sverige och den europeiska integrationen 1961–1971

Abstract

The use of armaments, diplomacy and economic pressure to intervene in the functioning of an enemy economy has been one of the most disputed concepts of warfare in the twentieth century. In the war against Germany after 1939 so called ‘economic warfare’ proved on the whole a poor investment of Allied resources with the notable exception of the bombing raids on synthetic oil factories. By contrast it was eminently successful in the campaigns against Japan. One obvious reason for the difference is that Japan was an island power against which the traditional techniques of naval blockade were effective whereas Germany by her territorial conquests on the continent was able greatly to extend her control over economic resources despite the blockade. But there were other reasons for the relative failure of ‘economic warfare’ against Germany and these, like the results of conquest, are central to these two works. One was that the complexity of the German economy in its international setting, combined with the difficulty of obtaining accurate economic information about an enemy economy during a war, meant that there was in reality no method of selecting with an accuracy sufficient to justify the deployment of large resources a link in the chain of production so weak that it could be destroyed. Secondly, a lurking suspicion that this might be so caused rapid changes in strategy, so that when weak links were identified the targets were seldom attacked for long enough for the strategy to succeed. Thirdly, the weapons and techniques of intervention in an enemy economy were seldom perfect enough to achieve their ambitious purpose. And finally German foreign trade even in strategic commodities survived because it was also in the interests of neutrals, and even in those of the Allies where their own economic relationship with the neutrals was concerned, that it should.     

Work in progress

Abstract

Work on the nineteenth century America may indeed be called work in progress —if that notoriously unfashionable word can be given any meaning at all in our fashionably disillusioned century. In any case, though ‘work in progress’ may logically imply progress in work, these notes are offered as a simple tribute to a fine scholar, not as an advance claim to accomplishment. No occasion would be more inappropriate to such a claim. Preferable indeed would be the kind of finely wrought, finished product that on such an occasion Söderlund himself would have produced. But even under his critical scrutiny—‘as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye'—a short sketch of some of the current effort in the United States may pass muster. It is sometimes wise, indeed, to look at the rose while the dew lies still upon it, before its flaws and frailties are opened out to pitiless light.     

The Swedish Salt Market during the Great Northern War

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the effects of the great naval blockade on the Swedish salt market during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Whether or not salt can be perceived as a strategic good subject of wartime shortage is important in interpreting the reasons behind the famous Swedish Navigation Act of 1724. New research claims that the Navigation Act was a welfare enhancing institution, as it helped to secure salt imports. This essay shows that although Sweden was at war with most European Great Powers and the subject of sea blockades during the Great Northern War, the salt market still worked remarkably well. Neither supply nor salt movements show any signs of a great crisis. Thus, there was no need to secure salt imports during the period of peace that followed. Consequently, the Swedish Navigation Act had little to do with welfare but more with rent seeking and monopolies on the freight market.     

依托进博会以进口助力宁波产业升级

以港口经济为核心竞争力的宁波面临产业升级的新局面，依托中国国际进口博览会召开的机遇，宁波市提出继续扩大对外开放，大力发展进口贸易的方针。通过分析宁波市进口规模、进口经营主体、进口商品结构等现状，发现其进口增长潜力充足且存在必要性。依托进博会进一步开放进口将助力宁波产业升级，包括发挥制造业逆向学习与协同效应、促使农业增效提质、带动港口特色显著的服务业。同时政府应该推动进口便利化举措、完善进口精细化管理、营造一流的进口营商环境，为以进口促进宁波产业升级提供政策配套。     

Balancing the Baltic trade: colonial commodities in the trade on the Baltic, 1773–1856

Abstract

This article attempts to look at the connection between the Atlantic and the Baltic economies during the transition from early modern to the modern era. Previous research has seriously underestimated the importance of colonial commodities traded on the Baltic during this period. Colonial commodities, particularly from the American plantation complex, became ever more important for the Western European balance of payments on the Baltic. Already by the late eighteenth century, these commodities were on aggregate worth approximately as much as the exports of strategic commodities such as grains or iron from the Baltic at the same time. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the value of colonial commodities imported to the region far surpassed the value of such key exports from the Baltic. The colonial commodities thus constituted an important part of the balance of payments for the trade on the Baltic.