The Comparative Study About Grain Price Of China And England From The Twelfth To The Nineteenth Century

To study on the activities of total process of national economy inagricultural societies, we must start with the emphasis on researching andillustrating on how the economy gross, such as the national income, financialrevenue, price level, and so on, was decided and fluctuated. Therefore, we mustcarry out the studies on total amount analysis and specific commodity price.Thus the studies on commodity price especially the studies on grain price areextremely important to understand and comb the economic phenomena andeconomic law in history, because the grain price is the most fundamental priceand has been the most important price which was most concerned by all peopleand governments. Grain price not only determines the price of lots ofcommodities, such as labor, land price and land rent, but also is the mainweights of inflation rate, which directly determines the level and inner ratio ofnational income and state revenues. By combing the long-period trend of grainprice, we can find that the ups and downs of grain price not only directly affectthe interests of all classes, influence the wealth distribution among all classes,but also directly impact on the social stability and the rise and fall of the regime.The cycle of grain price changes has close causal relationship with the cycle ofgovernmental rise and fall, the cycle of money supply, the cycle of populationgrowth and the cycle of per capita income growth. Therefore, grain price is the most major signal in the market price system, which had never been ignored bypast regimes and is being extremely paid attention by all present governments,who regard the grain price as the core price of CPI and give it strict management.As a result, the study on the grain price has the significant historical and realisticsignificance.This article’s core work is to summarize the foundational work of thehistorical grain price by the senior scholars, and to discuss and analyze thehistorical data of grain price between China and England. So that we can findout the law of the historical changes, furthermore compare and analyze on thedifferent factors of production behind the grain price in the two countries, suchas the money supply, population growth rate, the per capita agricultural acreage,and so on. This article tries to explain the following problems: the compare ofgrowth rate in grain price, the degree of grain financial level andcommercialization, and grain price in the inflation rate. Through the result ofthis article, we can find the following phenomenon: in the agricultural society,due to the economic growth rate (mainly per capita GDP growth rate) is verylow, roughly0.1%-0.3%in China and0.3%in Britain, there is a closerelationship between the rate of growth of GDP and the volatility cycle of grainprice that. Among them, the growth of the cultivated land area, the rise of laborproductivity, and the increase of industrial population, all have made anenormous impact on the volatility of the grain price. In addition, the volatility ofgrain price is caused by the supply fluctuation, in addition to this, mainly influenced by the money supply growth rate, and the population growth rate.