Specific Factors, Capital Markets, Portfolio Diversification and Free Trade: Domestic Determinants of the Repeal of the Corn Laws
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Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey Specific factors, capital markets, portfolio diversification and free trade: domestic determinants of the repeal of the Corn Laws Article (Published version) (Refereed) Original citation: Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl (1991) Specific factors, capital markets, portfolio diversification and free trade: domestic determinants of the repeal of the Corn Laws. World Politics, 43 (4). pp. 545- 569. ISSN 0043-8871 DOI: 10.2307/2010536 © 1991 Trustees of Princeton University This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/3420/ Available in LSE Research Online: April 2014 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. Trustees of Princeton University Specific Factors, Capital Markets, Portfolio Diversification, and Free Trade: Domestic Determinants of the Repeal of the Corn Laws Author(s): Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey Source: World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Jul., 1991), pp. 545-569 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2010536 . Accessed: 16/04/2014 04:14 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press and Trustees of Princeton University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Politics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 158.143.192.135 on Wed, 16 Apr 2014 04:14:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SPECIFIC FACTORS, CAPITAL MARKETS, PORTFOLIO DIVERSIFICATION, AND FREE TRADE DomesticDeterminants of the Repeal ofthe Corn Laws By CHERYL SCHONHARDT-BAILEY* T WO strandsof thoughtrelating to Britain'shistoric move to free trade in i846 offercontradictory interpretations of the underlying domestic economic and political forcesat work. On the one hand, the Ricardo-Viner specificfactors model implies that owners of two fac- tors-land and capital-stood diametricallyopposed to one another on the issue of freetrade. In the end, according to this view, capital gained the upper hand as seen in the i846 repeal of the Corn Laws. On the other hand, studies in the economic historyliterature posit that the economic interestsof these two groups of factorowners were not mutuallyexclu- sive; rather,their interestsoverlapped as a result of rapid economic changes in the i830s thatintensified landowner diversificationinto non- agriculturalventures. The implicationof the latterapproach is thatland- ownersas a group came to be divided betweenundiversified landowners, whose economic interestsremained tied to agriculture,and diversified landowners,whose interestsin agriculturehad lessened while their in- terestsin nonagriculturalsectors had increased.Hence, the undiversified group remainedthe only true "losers" fromfree trade in grain; members of the diversifiedgroup, by contrast,stood to gain or simply became indifferentto freetrade. * An earlierversion of this paper was presentedat the i989 JointAnnual Conventionof the BritishInternational Studies Associationand the InternationalStudies Associationand at the i989 All-U.C. Group in Economic HistoryConference. Comments from John Cony- beare, JeffFrieden, Barbara Geddes, Arye Hillman, David Lake, Peter Lindert,Tim Mc- Keown, and Daniel Verdierwere veryhelpful. My appreciationto Andrew Bailey forpains- takingeditorial assistance, to Dan Steinbergfor statistical advice, and to Craig Schonhardt forassistance with the tables. Support from the UCLA Centerfor International and Strategic Affairsand the UCLA Departmentof Political Science made possible the researchfor this paper. WorldPolitics 43 (July I991), 545-69 This content downloaded from 158.143.192.135 on Wed, 16 Apr 2014 04:14:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 546 WORLD POLITICS Of course,inherent to botharguments is the assumptionthat members of Parliamentvoted according to the economic interestsof theirconstit- uents. Elsewhere, I have demonstratedthe validityof this assumption.' The scope and intentof thispaper, then,is twofold.First, it discussesthe specific factorsmodel and its inadequacies as applied to nineteenth- centuryBritain, and it introducestwo modificationsthat allow the model to account for the anomalies we observe in the Britishcase. That is, I alter two key assumptionsof the specificfactors model by introducing the conceptsof portfoliodiversification and investmentcapital flowsinto the frameworkof factorspecificity in the shortrun. The predictedpolit- ical consequence of this modifiedversion of the model is that diversifi- cation lessened widespread protectionistsentiment among the landed elite. In the contextof a broader equilibrium model of trade policy lib- eralization, it disruptedthe initial protectionistequilibrium by decreas- ing the political benefitsthat accrued to M.P.'s fromvoting in favor of protection.2Portfolio diversification alone did not give rise to freetrade in Great Britain; but ratherit was one of several factorsthat shiftedthe political cost/benefitratio of M.P.'s in favorof freetrade. Second, this paper extends the concept of portfoliodiversification, as presented in the economic historyliterature, to the realm of policy- making,using a statisticalexamination of the correlationbetween dimin- ishing protectionistsentiment-through diversification-and the free trade policyoutcome. THE SPECIFIC FACTORS MODEL AND THE LONG- AND SHORT-RUN DIMENSIONS OF CAPITAL FORMATION The Ricardo-Vinerspecific factors model in neoclassicaltrade theoryde- finessome factorinputs as industryspecific and othersas intersectorally mobile. Industry-specificfactors give rise to industry-specificinterests that may eitherfavor or oppose protection,depending upon the formof trade competitionfacing the industry.Owners of factorsspecific to the domestic import-competingindustry gain from protection(via a rela- tivelyhigher price obtained from the industrygood), while owners of factorsspecific to the exportsector lose (similarly,via the relativelylower price of the industrygood). The preferenceof the mobile factorowner (forexample, labor) is ambiguous; thatis, althoughhe can move into the I CherylSchonhardt-Bailey, "A Model of Trade PolicyLiberalization: Looking Inside the British'Hegemon' of the NineteenthCentury" (Ph.D. diss., Universityof California,Los Angeles, i99i), chap. 3. 2 Ibid., chap. i. This content downloaded from 158.143.192.135 on Wed, 16 Apr 2014 04:14:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS 547 protectedsector, his welfare remains contingentupon his unique con- sumption preferences.It followsthat owners of factorsspecific to a par- ticularindustry will tend to seek protectionfor their industry and oppose protectionfor any otherindustry, whereas mobile factorowners will re- main largelyinactive. Standard trade theorytexts applying the specificfactors model to Brit- ain and the repeal of the Corn Laws posit (i) that landowners (that is, owners of factorsspecific to the import-competingindustry) and capital- ists (that is, owners of factorsspecific to the export sector) deriving in- comes from undiversifiedclaims to factorsopposed each other and (2) that after i832 industrialistshad taken over Parliament,thereby engi- neeringthe shifttoward freetrade.3 The standardapplication of the spe- cificfactors model to the Britishcase is correctin assuming that factors remained industryspecific and that trade policy had the effectof redis- tributingincome, therebycreating unambiguous winners and losers. However, the two pointsposited are incorrect. Taking the second point first,while the i832 Reform had extended suffrageto many middle-classmanufacturers,4 it did not, by i 846, sub- stantiallyalter the compositionof Parliament.The Parliament of i841- 47 remained firmlyunder the controlof landowners. By one estimate, about 8o percentof Parliamentconsisted of the landowning aristocracy and gentry.5Certainly if landownersas a group in Parliamentwished to halt the repeal legislation,they had the votes to do so. It is, however,the firstproblematic aspect to which this paper is di- rected. The specificfactors model implicitlyassumes that (i) undiversi- fied holdings of factorsprevail (that is, each person owns only one, or primarilyonly one, factorof production),and (2) capital as a factorof production refersto the stock of fixed capital available for productive purposes. Extensions to neoclassical trade theoryhave at times relaxed the firstassumption but have generallyretained the second. Mayer, for instance,constructs an equilibrium tariffmodel thatallows each person to own more than one factorand thatallows factorshares to varyamong people.6Each factorowner has