THE USAGE AND MEANING OF THE TERM «COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE» IN PRE-RICARDIAN ECONOMICS
THE USAGE AND MEANING OF THE TERM «COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE» IN PRE-RICARDIAN ECONOMICS

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this paper is to show how historical usage of the term «comparative advantage» developed from random mentions of the term in papers from various fields of science in the beginning of the 18th century to a more specific usage in agriculture, and later in international economics. We apply computerized text analysis using 3 voluminous databases operated by GALE CENGAGE Learning. Based at 50 million pages of text from the 18th/19th centuries, we have identified mentions of «comparative advantage» in pre-Ricardian texts. Our results show that before the 1820s, the term «comparative advantage» was used in a context more similar to the principle of «absolute advantage» than to its modern use and meaning. No research studying usage of the term «comparative advantage» has been published up to this date; hence, the present paper opens discussion in this field.

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