Economia internacional

IntroductionThe mercantilismo is a assembly of economic ideas that it considers that the prosperity of a nation or been depends on the capital that can have, and that the overall volume of world-wide commerce is unalterable. Capital, that is represented by the precious metals that the state has in its power, is increased mainly by means of a positive balance of trade with other nations (or, whichis the same, that the exports are superiors to the imports). The mercantilismo suggests the government leader of a nation would have to look for the attainment of those targets by means of a protectionist policy on its economy, favoring the export and working against the import, mainly by means of the imposition of tariffs. The economic policy based on these ideas sometimes receives the name ofmercantilista system.

The mercantilistas thinkers praise the economic development by means of the enrichment of the nations thanks to the External Trade, which allows to find exit to the surpluses of the production. The State acquires a primary role in the development of the national wealth, when adopting protectionist policies, and in particular establishing tariff barriers and measures ofsupport to the export.

Jakob Fugger “the rich one”, painted by Alberto Durero (1519), just when it was realizing the “business of the century”: the loan to Carlos I of Spain that allowed him to become Carlos V of Germany, when financing the numerous bribes of its imperial selection. The taxes with which it thought to give back the credit brought about the War of the Communities in Castile. Shortlybefore, the maneuvers theological-financiers of papado caused, also in Germany, the Lutheran Reformation. It is comprehensible that at the time was understood to the economy like something explicable from a secular point of view, not solely religious, a game of sum zero, in which one only gains what another one loses, and closely tie to the political power.
The mercantilismo as so it is not aschool of thought. It marks the end of the pre-eminence of the economic ideology of the Christianity (the crematística), inspired by Aristotle and Plato, who rejected the accumulation of wealth and the loans with interest (tie to the usury sin). This new economic current arises at a time at which the kings want to own the maximum of possible gold. The mercantilistas theories look for that target anddevelop a problematic cradle in the enrichment. This current is based on a system of analysis of the economic flows very simplified in which, for example, the paper does not consider that carries out the system social.

It was the predominant theory throughout all the Modern Age (from century XVI to the XVIII), time that approximately indicates the sprouting of the idea of the State Nation andthe well-known social economic formation like Old Regime in Western Europe. In the national level, the mercantilismo took to the former cases of operation and significant governmental control on the economy, and was in this period in which it went establishing great part of the modern capitalist system. Internationally, the mercantilismo served indirectly to impel many of the European wars of theperiod, and served like cause and foundation as European imperialism, since the great European powers fought by the control of the markets available in the world.

Like unifying agent directed toward the creation of a sovereign national state, the mercantilismo had two forces against: One, spiritual-more legal than political-economic one, was the universal powers: the Church and the Empire, theother, of predominantly economic character was the local particularismo, with the difficulty that produces to the communications and the survival of the natural economy (in particular areas the income of the S-state in species and not in money); whereas the mercantilista pretension is that the closed market is replaced by the national market and the merchandize as measured of value and average...