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What'S Space Got To Do With It? Distance And Agricultural Productivity Before The Railway Age

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Author Info
George Grantham ()

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Abstract

Owing to the high cost of transporting farm produce before the railway age, the land-intensiveness of European mixed farming caused both production and consumption of foodstuffs and intermediate farm inputs in the steady state to be highly dispersed, a spatial configuration offering weak inducement to reorganize farm structure or to invest available labour and capital with a view to increasing output. In such conditions the most common cause of rising agricultural productivity was spatial concentration of demand, which raised the demand price of farm produce and farm inputs within the privileged space bounded by discontinuities in the cost of land transport. The ultimate cause of observed changes in agricultural productivity before the nineteenth century must therefore be sought outside the farming sector in the development of markets for tradable manufactures, tradable services, and the economies of scale in their provision that supported spatial concentration of population.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by McGill University, Department of Economics in its series Departmental Working Papers with number 2007-10.

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Length: 50 pages
Date of creation: Sep 2007
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Handle: RePEc:mcl:mclwop:2007-10

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
B10 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - General
N53 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - Europe: Pre-1913
N74 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - Europe: 1913-
N93 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: Pre-1913
O18 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Regional, Urban, and Rural Analyses
Q13 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agricultural Markets and Marketing; Cooperatives; Agribusiness
R12 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)
R14 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
R40 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - Transportation Systems - - - General

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