Fluctuations in House-Building in Britain and the United States in the Nineteenth Century

H. J. Habakkuk

Chapter 7 in British Economic Fluctuations, 1790–1939, 1972, pp 236-267 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The notion that an ‘Atlantic Economy’ developed in the nineteenth century does not depend simply on the large movements of capital and labour from Britain to the United States. For there were movements of comparable magnitude to other areas. If the economic relations of Britain and North America are to be regarded as distinctive, it is principally because of the reciprocal movement of investment and growth in the two areas.2 The argument is that the periods of most rapid growth and intensive use of resources in the two economies were inversely related to each other, and that this alternation was established because there existed a common stock of resources, so that when one area drew rapidly on this stock it was at the expense of the other. At one time, investment in buildings and equipment in the United States was particularly rapid, and there was a heavy movement of migrants to America; in Britain the stream of migrants from the countryside was diverted from the industrial districts, and building and home investment were relatively depressed, but the vigorous demand for exports facilitated the flow of funds abroad. In the next period, the position was reversed; development slackened in the United States, and there was a revival of domestic investment in Britain.

Keywords: Nineteenth Century; Trade Cycle; Foreign Investment; Internal Migration; Residential Building (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1972
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-1-349-15463-0_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349154630

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-15463-0_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().