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The income distributional consequences of agrarian tariffs in Sweden on the eve of World War I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

JAN BOHLIN
JAN BOHLIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Economic History, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 720, SE 405 30 Gothenburg, [email protected]
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Abstract

After 1870 Swedish agriculture was transformed in the direction of more animal husbandry. Small farmers in particular specialized in animal produce. Agricultural protectionism, which was installed in response to increasing imports of overseas grain in the 1880s, primarily served the interest of large landowners specializing in bread-grain production. The impact of agrarian tariffs on the factor rewards of landowners, capitalists and workers is explored by means of a Computable General Equilibrium model of the Swedish economy in 1913. Landowners predictably benefited from agrarian tariffs, the more so if they specialized in bread-grain, as did rural workers. Urban capitalists would generally gain if agrarian tariffs had been dismantled. Real wages of workers in urban industries would most likely also improve, but the gain of urban workers was less clear-cut than for urban capitalists, being dependent on the degree of rural–urban labour mobility in response to wage changes.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Review of Economic History , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 2010 , pp. 1 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © European Historical Economics Society 2009

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