Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

We examine the long run relationship between innovation and economic development in Australia, using 150 years of data on patenting activity, and aggregate and sectoral economic indicators. Our initial results point to several important causal relationships, particularly the effects of patents on real GDP and of private capital formation on patents. We delve deeper at the sector level and find important causal relationships of patents with real foreign direct investment (FDI) since World War II. Australia's dependence on FDI for private capital formation served as an important stimulus for knowledge creation in key sectors including manufacturing, agriculture and mining.

Volumes of historical archives in China have been digitised, from which various datasets have been constructed for scholarly inquiry. Furthermore, the excavation of thousands of archaeological sites provided detailed data about prehistoric development across China's landmass. As a result, there has been remarkable progress in quantitative studies on China's past. This article reviews recent work in five theme areas to provide a background for the papers included in this special issue. These themes include state formation, Confucianism, human capital, Christian missionaries, and long-term persistence studies. The five papers in this issue fall into these themes and are introduced where appropriate.

This article examines the long-term effects of the administrative system using the Great Wall as a geographical discontinuity. Using town-level nighttime light luminosity per capita as a measure of economic development, we find that today, luminosity per capita is significantly and robustly higher in towns south of the Great Wall than in those north of it. The holding of resource allocation authority by the administrative hierarchy and the uniform enforcement of justice by hierarchy officials were advantageous for city building and judicial cross-territory enforceability on the south side of the great wall, which had a long-term impact on the imperial bureaucracy.

This paper studies the impact of cultural integration on business cooperation in the Republican Era. We collect the composition of bank boards and directors' biographical details of 28 principal banks in China, compiling a panel dataset from 1921 to 1936. The data allows us to classify directors' merchant groups, a typical cultural reflection, thereby calculating the cultural difference at the bank-pair level. Using the boards' cultural traits, we find cultural difference among bank boards is negatively related to their director-sharing decisions, an indicator of inter-bank cooperation. Also, cultural identity on boards facilitates banks to participate in loan syndicates with the yield and risk shared. Further composition tests show that cultural attitude towards clan orientation, trust and open spirit embedded in the business culture is the root of inter-banking cooperation. The finding reveals the importance of informal institutions in financial development and contributes to the debate on cultural and institutional bifurcation between China and Europe.

This study examines the intergenerational transmission of technology in historical China by constructing a genealogy dataset of the Huang family from 1400 to 1800. The family specialised in woodblock carving for book production, and their names were documented in these volumes, enabling measurement of technological output. Analysing 902 individuals across 16 generations reveals that carving skills were primarily transmitted from fathers to sons, with little influence from other family members or external artisans. Moreover, the production of books by the Huang family experienced a decline in the early 17th century, potentially attributed to weather shocks and decreased demand for books.

This paper studies the marital fertility—broadly defined as the ratio of live births to married women—of five Chinese lineages since the 17th century, mainly in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). The results demonstrate a unique pattern of Chinese marital fertility by exploiting new genealogical data and studying more than 50,000 individuals from five lineages. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the marital fertility rates in the period were moderate. On the other hand, in line with the classic ideas, this paper finds no clear indication of two fertility controls within marriages, parity-dependent early stopping and longer spacing.

This study examines the impact of a large-scale censorship campaign in Qing China (1644–1911) on intellectuals' writings. Using a Difference-in-Difference approach and analysing 23,000 poems, the study reveals a significant decrease in the frequency of censored words in poems written by censored intellectuals. There was no room to circumvent censorship by adopting homophones, split words, and variant characters. The machine learning analyses uncover some indication that the censorship campaign influenced intellectuals' writing styles, with intellectuals shifting away from the censored poetry. The campaign created intense political pressures, leading to self-censorship, but its long-term impact on word choices was minimal.

The brewing industry has undergone profound structural and spatial change over the last 150 years. We examine how consolidation began in Victoria's brewing industry using a historical GIS approach. We argue that industry restructuring was shaped by four interlocking dynamics between 1870 and 1900: (1) structural economic change; (2) railway development; (3) technological innovation; and (4) regulatory reform. We show that the ebb and flow of these interacting dynamics generated a non-linear process of change. Similar to North America and Europe, the industry became highly concentrated. However, this process was complicated by local factors such as climate, economy, and distance.

Patent applications by male New Zealand inventors sharply increased in the early 1880s after initial official fees were reduced, and the requirement to advertise applications in newspapers abolished. Increasingly, however, applications lapsed, while applications by unskilled workers remained low. Non-fee costs were crucially important, with the 1870 reduction in fees failing to increase patenting, as hoped, because the doubling of mandatory advertising costs negated the fees reduction. Patenting by overseas inventors was less affected by fees, and steadily grew. Only one application was by an indigenous Māori person, while even in 1899 women made just 2.5% of applications.