In the introduction, it was stated that this book aimed at replying to two main questions: why did world consumption increase in the long run, and what determined the competitiveness on the silk market (as represented by changes in market shares)? The book cannot offer a final word on either question because the data are not sufficient. But it does reach some conclusions, which in many cases do not fit with the conventional wisdom about the export of primary products and economic development.

The difference is clearer on the causes of growth. Until quite recently at least, the conventional wisdom attributed the growth of exports almost exclusively to the demand side. LDC would have simply reacted passively to the big increase in demand from the growing economies of the ‘core’ countries in the West. This was not the case for silk. As discussed in chapter 4, the silk-saving strategies of Western manufacturers caused the yarn producers to lose a sizeable art of the potential increase – at least until the 1890s. And the silk producers helped themselves considerably. According to the result of the econometric model, the total growth is evenly shared between the demand and the supply side.1 Admittedly, a part of contribution of the supply-side consisted in the devaluation of the producer countries’ currencies, which reflects their falling relative efficiency. None the less, as discussed in chapters 6 and 7, the technical progress in the silk production contributed substantially to this achievement. The performance of sericulture appears particularly remarkable. Supposedly backward agricultural countries achieved very high rates of technical progress, and succeeded in increasing their output and expanding the production in spite of falling relative prices of cocoons.