Ilse Mintz’s study asks how American exports behaved across eight decades of business fluctuations and whether the much-discussed 1957–59 decline signaled cyclical adjustment or deeper loss of competitiveness.
This paper analyzes the cyclical fluctuations of United States exports during some eight decades.
The immediate occasion is balance-of-payments anxiety, but Mintz’s method is deliberately historical. The recent fall, she argues, was “relatively sharp, but not extraordinary”: exports had risen spectacularly before falling, and over the full 1954–58 cycle both total exports and the U.S. share of world imports remained historically strong. Her caution is central: historical comparison can normalize panic without declaring present adequacy.
Whether results which compare favorably with past achievements are adequate for the present situation is a different matter which does not lie within the scope of this paper.
The book’s structure moves from the 1957–59 appraisal to a systematic Burns-Mitchell cycle analysis. Mintz first places exports within national output, then examines three relations: exports and U.S. business cycles, exports and world import cycles, and world imports and U.S. cycles. Later chapters refine the problem through phase-segment analysis and through co- and counter-phases of world trade and domestic business. The appendices document the quarterly export and world-import series, seasonal adjustments, and conformity measures.
Her main thesis is that U.S. exports are governed chiefly by foreign demand, proxied by imports of the world outside the United States, but that their relation to domestic business cycles changed historically. Before World War I, exports did not simply rise in U.S. expansions and fall in contractions; after World War I, they increasingly did. This was not because exports were formerly random. Mintz’s key conceptual move is to abandon full-cycle phases as the sole unit of observation and divide business phases into earlier and later segments. Doing so reveals a persistent internal pattern.
It is clear now that the similarity of export changes in expansions and contractions is not due to their lack of response to business cycles, but rather to a peculiar type of response, which involves two roughly offsetting changes in each cycle phase.
Before 1913 exports rose early in expansions, weakened late in expansions, rose rapidly early in contractions, and fell late in contractions. Mintz calls attention to this alternating positive and inverse relation rather than forcing it into a simple conformity index. The later shift toward conformity occurred mainly because exports stopped rising strongly in the early part of domestic contractions. Thus the story is not a move from disorder to order, but a change in the balance of an already systematic pattern.
Foreign demand remains the dominant explanatory variable.
Most economists share Mitchell’s view—confirmed by our study—that foreign demand is the most important factor in export fluctuations.
Mintz’s evidence is strongest in the comparison with world imports. U.S. exports turned with world import cycles, rose in every world expansion, and fell in every world contraction. Yet the rate of U.S. export change often differed from world imports, leaving room for domestic influences, commodity composition, prices, delivery conditions, and especially agriculture in the prewar period.
No doubt a large part—in the later period the major part—of export changes can be traced back to changes in world imports.
The relevance of the study lies in this separation of cyclical channels. Mintz shows that exports are small relative to total output, but not negligible in recessions: after World War II, export declines accounted for a sizable share of output contractions. At the same time, their balance-of-payments role gives them importance beyond their share of GNP. The work therefore reframes export decline as a problem of timing, world demand, and relative market share, not simply national weakness.
The core contribution is methodological as much as substantive: Mintz turns aggregate exports into a cyclical object, distinguishes domestic from world-trade phases, and uses the U.S. export share of world imports to identify movements not explained by world demand alone. Her conclusion is measured: the 1957–59 decline was part of a recurring cyclical pattern, but the slower growth of manufactured export quantities remained a possible warning sign requiring further commodity-level analysis.
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