The Significance of the Price Trends

Abstract

Whatever the outcome may be of the controversy between the supporters of the quantitative theory and those of the population hypothesis ¹, there is no doubt that both the production of precious metal and the demographic development are very important factors in the secular price movement. In Brabant indeed the declining price trend of the fifteenth century cannot be separated from the demographic stagnation and the acute European shortage of precious metal. It is equally true that the rising prices of the sixteenth century can only be understood if the powerful demographic expansion of the first half of the century and the gradual, and later even massive, penetration of German and American precious metal into the monetary circulation of Brabant is taken into account.