Переводчик Гаркуша Полина Олеговна

Britain became the leading economy in the eighteenth century, initially by improving its financial, banking, fiscal, and agricultural institutions along the lines pioneered by the Dutch, and subsequently by a surge in industrial productivity. The latter was not only based on the acceleration of technical progress and investments in physical capital, education, and skills, but also on commercial trade policy, which, in 1846, reduced protective duties on agricultural imports and by 1860 unilaterally removed all trade and tariff restrictions. The British willingness to specialize in industrial production and import a large part of its food had positive effects on the world economy and diffused the impact of technical progress, but most of all it allowed Britain to achieve unprecedented rates of economic growth and establish a global economic and political power. This progress came to an end as a result of two world wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) and the Great Depression in the 1930s, which drastically raised trade impediments and led to a collapse of trade, capital, and migration flows. As a consequence, the world economy grew much more slowly from 1913 to 1950 than from 1870 to 1913.
The institutional arrangements with codes of behavior and cooperation set up after the Second World War created a new liberal international order which contributed to remarkable growth rates of income per capita (3 per cent per year), total world income (5 per cent per year), and world trade flows (8 per cent per year). At the same time, the world economy became more closely connected than ever before. During the first wave of globalization in the nineteenth century there was an increase of trade in basic and homogeneous commodities. During the second wave after the Second World War, there was an increase of trade in basic and differentiated manufactured products. Decreases in transport costs, technological improvements, falling trade restrictions, international cooperation, and improved communication possibilities have all been important underlying forces in the two waves of globalization; think of the railway, the steamship, the opening of the Suez canal and the Panama canal (which cut travel times and avoided the dangerous routes around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn), and technological inventions, such as effective means of refrigeration (which enabled the transportation of perishable goods such as meat and fruit).