Vent for Surplus Reconsidered with Ghanaian Experience

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Periodical article

Title:	Vent for Surplus Reconsidered with Ghanaian Experience
Author:	Ingham, Barbara
Year:	1979
Periodical:	Journal of Development Studies
Volume:	15
Issue:	3
Period:	April
Pages:	19-37
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Ghana
Subjects:	subsistence economy trade cocoa Economics and Trade
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1080/00220387908421724
Abstract:	Adam Smith's vent for surplus theory of international trade was revived by Myint in the 1950s and subsequently generated a number of new contributions on the nature of the trade-growth relationship in traditional peasant economies under colonialism. The theme of this paper, which uses some empirical material on the cocoa industry in Ghana (Gold Coast) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is to suggest that economists have been to ready in their acceptance of these newer versions of vent for surplus, which now set the approach firmly within neoclassical microeconomics and a framework of comparative statics, as valid representations of the historical experience. Notes, ref., tab.