Trade and income growth in the Ottoman Empire: assessing the role of volatility and trend growth in terms of trade

Cemal Eren Arbatli ()

Eurasian Economic Review, 2016, vol. 6, issue 2, No 2, 173-194

Abstract: Abstract This paper focuses on the Ottoman economy from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the early twentieth century when the first wave of economic globalization coupled with the sweeping forces of rapid industrialization in the West led to major structural changes that are deemed to be responsible for the Great Divergence in income levels. An important part of this process for the Ottoman economy and the rest of the Periphery was secular improvements and increased volatility in the relative price of exports compared to imports, i.e., the terms of trade (ToT). A large body of literature suggests that both the changes in and the volatility of ToT may affect economic development in different ways. We present empirical predictions for Ottoman income growth under various counterfactual ToT scenarios to offer a perspective on the absolute and relative importance of ToT volatility and ToT growth for the Ottoman economy. According to our findings, Ottoman GDP per capita could have grown about 0.63–0.80 $$\text{percentage}$$ percentage points faster on average per year over the period 1800–1870, if the Empire faced only half the decadal ToT volatility it actually experienced over the same period.

Keywords: Terms of trade; Growth; Volatility; Ottoman Empire; Periphery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F63 N15 N75 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40822-015-0044-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:eurase:v:6:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s40822-015-0044-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40822

DOI: 10.1007/s40822-015-0044-3

Access Statistics for this article

Eurasian Economic Review is currently edited by Dorothea Schäfer

More articles in Eurasian Economic Review from Springer, Eurasia Business and Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().