0 an economic theory developed in the 16th to 18th centuries that says that a government should control the economy and that a nation should increase its wealth by selling more than it buys from other nations
1 an economic theory developed in the 16th to 18th centuries holding that a government should control the economy and that a nation should increase its wealth by selling more than it buys from other nations
2 the idea that a country's government should try to influence trade and business, especially by encouraging exports and putting limits on imports:
With the philosophy of mercantilism, trade concessions are only made in response to those made by another government.
Change came in the 1990s because the foundation that supported the concept of embedded mercantilism came apart.
Whatever historians say about mercantilism, economists and other social scientists simply use it today as a shorthand for protection and other sorts of state intervention.
But if mercantilism is interpreted in terms of links with merchant capitalism this view becomes untenable.
The use of the concept of mercantilism provides a specific example of one of those problems made manifest.
Mercantilism and cameralism promoted the view that the wealth of a ruler and his people depended on the amount of cash flow and metals.
Unfortunately, because of their common starting point and the confusion which it generated about the very nature of mercantilism, the results sometimes merely make confusion worse confounded.
He did not adopt a stage-theory of economic growth; he saw mercantilism simply as a system of thought and policy which aimed to achieve certain ends.
There is a danger of the world relapsing into a form of latter-day mercantilism.
