ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Unbalanced Growth and Premature Stagnation. A comparative appraisal of Malthus (1803) and Mill (1804) on international corn trade
Author: Salvadori Neri, Signorino Rodolfo
In this paper, we propose a rational reconstruction of the arguments employed by Malthus (1803) to support a system of protection for British agriculture and, contrariwise, by Mill (1804) to demonstrate its inexpediency. The main motivation underlying the present paper is not just to show that Malthus versus Mill in the early 1800s provides a foretaste of Malthus versus Ricardo in the mid-1810s. We rather aim to prove that Chapters VII to X of Book III of the second edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population provide the theoretical backdrop for the empirical arguments raised by Malthus to support his food autarky policy proposals twelve years later in Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn. From this perspective, we interpret the 1815 pamphlet as Malthus’s attempt to show that the European economical and political scenario in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars confirmed the validity of the theoretical analysis developed in his 1803 book
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