The structure and dynamic of Germany's foreign trade 1880 to 1912

1880年至1912年间，德意志帝国成为欧洲领先的工业国家，重点是机械，车辆和电子技术产品等。这些部门仍然是德国经济的特征。与此同时，德国经济与其欧洲和全球贸易伙伴的融合达到了前所未有的程度。我们的研究建议的核心是德国对外贸易的专业化动态，即随着时间的推移，商品类别和贸易伙伴的结构都发生了变化。基于一个新的数据集，其中包括德国对外贸易的各个方面，我们分析了贸易的结构变化和德国的崛起，以最大的工业出口的大陆。我们的研究假设表明，德意志帝国作为欧洲工业核心的崛起不仅仅是由国内因素决定的，而是受到她与特定贸易伙伴的互动的关键和因果影响。为此，我们使用计量经济学的方法来测试外部（外贸）因素对德国的专业化动态的影响，此外，我们补充这种方法与特定行业的历史案例研究，以评估潜在的理论假设和研究结果对总体经济发展的合理性。

Between 1880 and 1912 the German Empire emerged as the leading industrial nation of Europe with a focus in machinery, vehicles, and electro-technical goods among others. These sectors characterize the German economy still today. Simultaneously, the German economy became integrated with its European and global trading partners to an unprecedented degree. At the core of our research proposal is the specialization dynamic of Germanys foreign trade, that is changes in both the structure of commodity groups and trading partners over time. Based on a novel dataset, which encompasses all dimensions of German foreign trade, we analyze the structural change in trade and Germanys rise to the largest industrial exporter of the continent. Our research hypothesis states that the emergence of the German Empire as the industrial core of Europe was not determined by domestic factors alone, but crucially and causally affected by her interaction with specific trading partners. To this end we use econometric methods to test for the impact of external (foreign trade) factors on Germanys specialization dynamics; moreover we complement this approach with historical case studies on specific industries to assess the plausibility of the underlying theoretical assumptions and findings on aggregate economic developments.