【Notes and Communications】Sir Edward West and the Principle of Diminishing Returns: Its Application to the 1815 Corn Law Question

Abstract

In his Essay on the Application of Capital to Land (1815), Edward West (1782-1828) set himself in opposition to the approval of the new Corn Law bill in 1815. His discussions on the Corn Law question include some original ideas, which were different from those of his contemporaries such as David Ricardo (1772-1823) and Robert Torrens (1780?-1864), who were against the bill. One of West’s original ideas can be found in his argument about the effect of free importation of corn on domestic agriculture, of which Mawatari (1997, 85-86) provides a simple diagrammatic understanding that falls short of being satisfying.1 We formalize West’s idea into a tractable model and theoretically demonstrate that even if cheap foreign corn was freely imported, as far as the principle of diminishing returns in the production of corn is valid, producers in the home country would not completely disappear from the market.2 【Notes and Communications】