EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Adjustment under the Classical Gold Standard (1870s-1914): How Costly did the External Constraint Come to the European periphery?

Matthias Morys

No 353, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Conventional wisdom has that peripheral economies had to `play by the rules of the game` under the Classical Gold Standard (1870s-1914), while core countries could get away with frequent violations. Drawing on the experience of three core economies (England, France, Germany) and seven peripheral economies (Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Norway, Serbia, Sweden), my paper argues for a more nuanced perspective on the European periphery. While the conventional view might be true for some countries - most notably the Balkan countries - our findings, based on a VAR model and impulse response functions, suggest that the average gold drain that a specific peripheral economy was exposed to differed substantially from country to country. We also show that some of the peripheral economies, most notably Austria-Hungary, always enjoyed enough pulling power via discount rate policy to reverse quickly any such gold outflow. In sum, while the experience of some peripheral economies under gold was poor and hence normally short-lived, the experience of other peripheral countries resembled more those of the core economies.

JEL-codes: E52 E58 N13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-his and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:678fc836-265a-40a4-8fa6-516346c98a3c (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:353

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:353