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，主要集中在机械、车辆和电子技术产品等领域。这些行业至今仍是德国经济的特征。与此同时，德国经济与其欧洲和全球贸易伙伴的一体化达到了前所未有的程度。我们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，商品集团的结构和贸易伙伴的变化。基于一个新的数据集，其中涵盖了德国对外贸易的所有维度，我们分析了贸易的结构变化，德国成为欧洲大陆最大的工业出口国。我们的研究假设认为，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方法来检验外部(对外贸易)因素对德国专业化动态的影响；此外，我们还通过对特定行业的历史案例研究来补充这一方法，以评估关于总体经济发展的基本理论假设和发现的合理性。

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.