Terms of trade

Terms of trade (TOT) refers to the relative price of exports in terms of imports and is defined as the ratio of export prices to import prices. It can be interpreted as the amount of import goods an economy can purchase per unit of export goods.

An improvement of a nation's terms of trade benefits that country in the sense that it can buy more imports for any given level of exports. The terms of trade may be influenced by the exchange rate because a rise in the value of a country's currency lowers the domestic prices of its imports but may not directly affect the prices of the commodities it exports.

History

The term (barter) terms of trade was first coined by the US American economist Frank William Taussig in his 1927 book International Trade. However, an earlier version of the concept can be traced back to the English economist Robert Torrens and his book The Budget: On Commercial and Colonial Policy, published in 1844, as well as to John Stuart Mill's essay Of the Laws of Interchange between Nations; and the Distribution of Gains of Commerce among the Countries of the Commercial World, published in the same year, though allegedly already written in 1829/30.