Canada And The Gold Standard

This interpretation of the Canadian experience extends the monetary approach to balance-of-payments adjustment that realizes the full implications of international capital mobility.

This is a timely review of the gold standard covering the 110 years of its operation until 1931, when Britain abandoned it in the midst of the Depression. Current dissatisfaction with floating rates of exchange has spurred interest in a return to a commodity standard. The studies in this volume were designed to gain a better understanding of the historical gold standard, but they also throw light on the question of whether restoring it today could help cure inflation, high interest rates, and low productivity growth. The volume includes a review of the literature on the classical gold standard; studies the experience with gold in England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Canada; and perspectives on international linkages and the stability of price-level trends under the gold standard. The articles and commentaries reflect strong, conflicting views among hte participants on issues of central bank behavior, purchasing-power an interest-rate parity, independent monetary policies, economic growth, the "Atlantic economy," and trends in commodity prices and long-term interest rates. This is a thoughtful and provocative book.

An intriguing view of the Canadian economy before WWI, this study fills a gap in the existing literature on the economic history of Canada. Using improved monetary statistics, the author explains how the business cycle worked under the gold standard, and takes an in-depth look at the roles the banks, the government and the public played in relation to Canada's balance of payments and the gold stock.

Currency crises in Europe and Mexico during the 1990s provided stark reminders of the importance and the fragility of international financial markets. These experiences led some commentators to conclude that open international capital markets are incompatible with financial stability. But the pre-1914 gold standard is an obvious challenge to the notion that open capital markets are sources of instability. To deepen our understanding of how this system worked, this volume draws together recent research on the gold standard. Theoretical models are used to guide qualitative discussions of historical experience, while econometric methods are used to help the historical data speak clearly. The result is an overview of the gold standard, a survey of the relevant applied research in international macroeconomics, and a demonstration of how the past can help to inform the present.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was ready to adopt the gold standard out of concerns of national power, prestige, and anti-English competition. Yet although the gold standard allowed countries to enact a virtual single world currency, the years before World War I were not a time of unfettered liberal economics and one-world, one-market harmony. Outside of Europe, the gold standard became a tool for nationalists and protectionists primarily interested in growing domestic industry and imperial expansion. This overlooked trend, provocatively reassessed in Steven Bryan's well-documented history, contradicts our conception of the gold standard as a British-based system infused with English ideas, interests, and institutions. In countries like Japan and Argentina, where nationalist concerns focused on infant-industry protection and the growth of military power, the gold standard enabled the expansion of trade and the goals of the age: industry and empire. Bryan argues that these countries looked less to Britain and more to North America and the rest of Europe for ideological models. Not only does this history challenge our idealistic notions of the prewar period, but it also reorients our understanding of the history that followed. Policymakers of the 1920s latched onto the idea that global prosperity before World War I was the result of a system dominated by English liberalism. Their attempt to reproduce this triumph helped bring about the global downturn, the Great Depression, and the collapse of the interwar world.