Domestic Trade and Market Size in Late Eighteenth-Century France

Guillaume Daudin ()

No _069, Oxford University Economic and Social History Series from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Abstract: Market size is claimed by various economic traditions to be an important factor in explaining the transition to modern economic growth. This paper examines whether differences in market size might explain the retardation of the Industrial Revolution in France. It uses an exceptional source on French domestic trade in a variety of goods in the late eighteenth century: the Tableaux du Maximum. The first part presents this source and the data. The second part assesses whether the data are plausible using a logit theoretical gravity equation. The third part uses the results of this gravity equation to compute the expected market size of specific supply centres. For all types of high value-to-weight goods, some French supply centres reached 25 million people or more. For all types of textile groups, some French supply centres reached 20 million people or more. Even taking into account differences in real, nominal and disposable income per capita, these supply centres had access to domestic markets that were at least as large as the whole of Britain. Differences in the size of foreign markets were too small to reverse that result.

JEL-codes: F15 N73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-int
Date: 2008-05-02

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/Economics/History/Paper69/69daudin.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Domestic Trade and Market Size in Late Eighteen Century France (2007)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_069

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Oxford University Economic and Social History Series from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Maxine Collett ().