Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1944, Side 41

INSTITUTE OF ECONOMICS AND HISTORY
3i
business and industry from the middle of the i9th Century to
the outbreak of the first World War.2 *) This book, which was
published in 1930, makes useful contributions to the technique
of such investigations while at the same time it greatly advances
our knowledge of the actual living conditions of the workers
during this most important period of Danish history when the
trade unions first came to life. As a matter-of-fact, Jorgen Peder-
sen has succeeded in constructing a fairly comprehensive cost-of-
living index for the period, which can be used in forming a sound
judgment as to the “real wages” of the times. However, Pedersen
does not limit himself to a description of the wage- and living-
cost problems of the pre-World-War-I generations. He also
utilizes the material at hand to reach conclusions of a theoretical
nature for the benefit of the economics of wages.
This is to a still higher degree true of his book, “An Ana-
lysis of Price Behaviour during the Period 1855—1913,” written
in collaboration with O. Strange-Petersen and published in Eng-
lish in 1938. The purpose of this treatise, which, unlike its pre-
decessor, is based on the study of wholesale prices, is to follow
the behaviour of individual prices and groups of prices in order
to find out whether these are governed by international trends or
not. In order to reach general conclusions of this kind, the authors
constantly compare the Danish price material with prices from
abroad. This study of the behaviour of prices, seemingly so purely
an economic subject, reaches results of interest to the historian
as well as the economist. Thus, the authors, by means of hard
figures, conclusively demonstrate the great improvement that
has taken place in the quality of certain important Danish export
products, such as butter and pork, during the period under study.
While the economists were studying prices and wages as their
contribution to the common task, the historians concentrated their
work on the development of the trade unions and the relationship
between capital and labour. As the starting point, the year 1857
was chosen when an Act was put on the statute books abolishing
as from 1862 the medieval guild system and thereby revolution-
izing working conditions in trade and industry. The investigation
was carried up to 1899, the year when a great lock-out was settled
by means of an agreement between the employers5 association
2) Jergen Pedersen: Arbejdslonnen i Danmark under skiftende Konjunk-
turer ca. 1850—1913. (1930).