Trade and Industrial Statistics of Representative Organizations of Entrepreneurs of the Ukrainian Provinces (Second Half of the Nineteenth – Beginning of the Twentieth Century)

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to characterize the contribution of representative organizations of entrepreneurs in the development of trade and industrial statistics; to trace the relationship between the very origin of these organizations and the state’s need for statistical information.

The system of theories (corporativism, elitism, groups of pressure), approaches (interdisciplinary, "advantages of backwardness" of A.Gershenkron), the principles (historicism, scientific and objectivity) and methods of scientific knowledge (system, comparative-historical, analyticalsynthetic, etc.) is methodological principles of article.

Results. In the second half of the nineteenth century the government of the Russian Empire is increasingly lacking in factual information to control and coordinate the dynamic development of the country’s economy. One of the main tasks of newly created representative organizations of entrepreneurs was the collection of statistics. Over time, statistics have evolved into a separate line of activity for representative associations, providing both the government and entrepreneurs with the necessary data, as a tool for development and, at the same time, preventing deep crises. Special statistical units created within the structure of representative unions often innovated statistics as a science of methods of collection, principles of analysis and information processing. Published statistics of entrepreneurial representative organizations (tables, analytical reviews, reference books, etc.) have become a necessary component of economic development both in the post-reform period and in subsequent periods of history. The prospects for the research are related to the further elaboration of the statistical materials collected by representative organizations, their analysis from a practically economic and theoretical point of view of the development of statistics as a science. The topic raised is of practical importance, as the statistics analyzed from a historical point of view reveal the peculiarities of socio-economic and trade-industrial processes in the Ukrainian lands in the second half of the nineteenth century – at the beginning of the twentieth century the interaction of power and capital, the importance of private statistics for the development of the country’s economy and their impact on official statistics. For the first time in the national historical science the influence of trade and industrial statistics on the process of origin, formation and activity of representative organizations of entrepreneurs of the post-reform period has been separately investigated.