Trade and Protectionism in Interwar Germany
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: History Faculty
Abstract
For my dissertation, I would make use of German archival sources, mostly legislative texts to build a database of German trade policy at a commodity level throughout the period. I hope to be able to quantify these restrictions that are very varied in nature and construct a measure that I can include in the econometric part of the work. All necessary sources should be documented and held in German archives, especially in the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive) in Berlin, where I can also get access to the files on tariff regulations from the Reich Ministry of Finance, which was in charge of tariffs. In many cases documents have also been digitised, for example the Reichsgesetzblatt or the
protocols of the Reichskanzlei and the Reichstag. To work through all this material, I would need to spend some time in Berlin early on in my studies.
As a native German speaker, I will have no problem reading these sources. Once I have collected this material and brought it into a consistent format, I will be able to merge it with the trade data and, making use of my training in economics and a working knowledge of trade theory, analyse the impact of policy. While I am confident that this project is achievable within a three-year period, the focus of my research could easily be narrowed to either the Weimar (1919-33) or the Nazi years (1933-39), should the scope turn out to be too broad.
I hope to answer several questions through the course of this project: Firstly, what role trade policy in Germany played in the dramatic collapse of international trade. Secondly, I want to examine to what extent explicit trade policy shifted the German trade relations towards the Reichsmark bloc found in the 1930s. More generally, I want to analyse how commodity-specific trade policy impacted the German economy and possibly had a different impact between sectors. Finally, it might be possible to look at policy as a consequence rather than the cause of the interwar period's economic upheavals and examine to what extent different sectors were disproportionally hit with protectionism in consequence of the hyperinflation, the Great Depression, or the Nazi rise to
power, and how the political economy of Weimar and Nazi Germany shaped these decisions.
The methods used in this endeavour will presumably be mostly quantitative and econometric in nature. Bromhead et al.14 build upon a nested CES utililty function and use structural gravity equations as their regression framework. They then determine trade elasticities for separate sectors and construct counterfactual commodity flows under assumed free trade. My first approach
would be to follow their example but to what extent this methodology would have to be adjusted to the specific German case depends on a closer look at the archival material.
14. Bromhead et al., "Protection and the shift towards Empire in interwar Britain."
protocols of the Reichskanzlei and the Reichstag. To work through all this material, I would need to spend some time in Berlin early on in my studies.
As a native German speaker, I will have no problem reading these sources. Once I have collected this material and brought it into a consistent format, I will be able to merge it with the trade data and, making use of my training in economics and a working knowledge of trade theory, analyse the impact of policy. While I am confident that this project is achievable within a three-year period, the focus of my research could easily be narrowed to either the Weimar (1919-33) or the Nazi years (1933-39), should the scope turn out to be too broad.
I hope to answer several questions through the course of this project: Firstly, what role trade policy in Germany played in the dramatic collapse of international trade. Secondly, I want to examine to what extent explicit trade policy shifted the German trade relations towards the Reichsmark bloc found in the 1930s. More generally, I want to analyse how commodity-specific trade policy impacted the German economy and possibly had a different impact between sectors. Finally, it might be possible to look at policy as a consequence rather than the cause of the interwar period's economic upheavals and examine to what extent different sectors were disproportionally hit with protectionism in consequence of the hyperinflation, the Great Depression, or the Nazi rise to
power, and how the political economy of Weimar and Nazi Germany shaped these decisions.
The methods used in this endeavour will presumably be mostly quantitative and econometric in nature. Bromhead et al.14 build upon a nested CES utililty function and use structural gravity equations as their regression framework. They then determine trade elasticities for separate sectors and construct counterfactual commodity flows under assumed free trade. My first approach
would be to follow their example but to what extent this methodology would have to be adjusted to the specific German case depends on a closer look at the archival material.
14. Bromhead et al., "Protection and the shift towards Empire in interwar Britain."
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Alexander Wulfers (Student) |
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES/P000649/1 | 01/10/2017 | 30/09/2027 | |||
| 1923554 | Studentship | ES/P000649/1 | 01/10/2017 | 14/04/2021 | Alexander Wulfers |
| Description | The project consists of three papers with distinct findings. The first paper discusses the political economy of trade policy in the Weimar Republic. I have collected data on the economic structure of interwar Germany at the district level. I show that there is an increasing correlation of a sector's trade balance and the sector's voting behaviour with regards to protectionist parties and that the protectionist vote increasingly shifts to the Nazis. This research confirms that trade policy is an important factor in electoral results of the Weimar Republic which has been neglected so far. The second paper is an in-depth discussion of the structure of German trade during the Great Depression. I show that there are notable parallels in the 1930s trade collapse with that in the 2008 financial crisis, suggesting that similar compositional affects may be at work in causing these collapses. The third paper investigates the impact of trade policy on trade during the 1930s. I show that rising tariffs caused about a 40 percent drop in imports by 1933, about 50 percent by 1938, suggesting that protectionism contributed to a trade collapse twice as big as the 2008 collapse, but only accounts for a minority of the total decline in the 1930s. Furthermore, it did not contribute significantly to the geographical shift of trade in this period. |
| Exploitation Route | The data I have collected will be extremely useful in more in-depth analyses of German trade and I will eventually make them publically available. Furthermore, I hope that future research will continue to fill in the puzzle pieces of international trade in the interwar period. My analysis of one country, Germany, contributes to that and lays further groundwork for comparative analysis. |
| Sectors | Government, Democracy and Justice |