Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

That geography shapes long-run economic change is almost an axiom in economic history, but there is neither adequate understanding nor much agreement about how this influence works. This article is an attempt to contextualise Indian economic history against what we now know of this influence. It is also an attempt to define the geographical condition of the South Asia region in a manner compatible with the purpose of economic history, which is to explain the deep roots of economic growth and inequality.

We survey the recent economics and history literature on the Chinese state to investigate its role in China's long-term socioeconomic development. We highlight three insights. First, unlike in Europe, where interstate competition helped give rise to capitalist states with high capacity, the Chinese state emerged from a different historical context. Second, the 18th- and 19th-century Chinese state does not fit into the mould of a strong and extractive Oriental despotic state as once commonly believed. By conventional measures, early modern China had a weak state. Third, state building and centre-local relations are two useful dimensions to understand development and change in China's recent history and political economy. To adapt China to a changing world, Chinese state builders embarked on a long process of state building from the late-19th century through the Republican and Communist eras. Facilitated partly by regional decentralisation, the process now sees the Chinese state playing a substantially larger role in the economy and everyday life than any previous time in history.

This study reviews research examining agricultural development in industrialising Japan. We focus on the (dys)functioning of markets for land, finance, labour and agricultural commodities. We cover topics including land (mis)allocation, size-productivity relationships, tenancy contract choice and Marshallian inefficiency, property rights, microfinance, shock-coping strategies, rural–urban migration and agricultural market integration. The literature reveals that market failures often observed in developing economies were not prominent, except for possibly labour markets. The literature also highlights the roles and administrative capacities of central and local governments. Tight local communities served to reduce transaction costs.

Quantitative comparisons of living standards across Eurasia continue to conclude that the eastern side of the “great divergence,” including Japan, lagged behind the leading regions of Europe from early-modern times onwards. The “industrious revolution” model attributes this to the early spread in Europe of markets for labour and consumer goods. By contrast, in Japan, persistent household self-sufficiency must have precluded improvements driven by market participation. However, qualitative evidence on the history of the now globally renowned Japanese diet reveals how a different dietary pattern, involving continued household-based, non-market production activities, might nonetheless have generated improved living standards, even if these are invisible to quantitative assessment.

Empirical work is dominating business history, with a particular emphasis on case research using rich primary sources. I argue that the field of business history would benefit from a balanced combination of theoretical and empirical work. Restoring this balance requires that business historians build theories using their empirical observations. This approach – theorising – may enrich the field of business history and enhance the impact on related fields. I also argue that testing business history theory requires a broad set of empirical techniques, that is, bizhismetrics.

This paper introduces a new dataset of commodity-specific, bilateral import data for four large Asian economies in the interwar period: China, the Dutch East Indies, India and Japan. It uses these data to describe the interwar trade collapses in the economies concerned. These resembled the post-2008 Great Trade Collapse in some respects but not in others: they occurred along the intensive margin, imports of cars were particularly badly affected, and imports of durable goods fell by more than those of non-durables, except in China and India which were rapidly industrialising. On the other hand the import declines were geographically imbalanced, while prices were more important than quantities in driving the overall collapse.

The Australian economy experienced very frequent and sizeable terms of trade shocks. These shocks at times were more pronounced than commodity exporting developing countries and disproportionately benefited the extreme top end of income distribution. Did they derail overall economic progress? Circumstantial evidence suggests that they did not, but hard econometric evidence appears to be rare. In this paper, I revisit the Australian resource curse question from a long-run perspective. Using time series data on commodity prices, real GDP, real wages, non-farm GDP, manufacturing share of GDP, and manufacturing share of employment covering the period 1900 to 2007, I find very little evidence of a resource curse. Commodity booms in general and positive agricultural price shocks in particular appear to have impacted the rest of the economy positively both in short- and long-run. The positive effect is primarily led by expansion in manufacturing. This is perhaps reflective of trade protection, labour and credit market flexibility, and relatively open skilled migration in Australia especially during the post-war period.

We document the origins of Australia's egalitarianism by quantifying both the level and trends of earnings inequality during 1870–1910 by constructing social tables for earnings, thus overcoming the constraints imposed by the lack of income, tax and wealth data. We find that earnings inequality was much lower in Australia than in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1870 and that there was no rise in Australian earnings inequality over the half century 1870–1910, but rather a fall. We argue that such findings are driven by a faster skill supply growth relative to demand.

We provide evidence on the dynamic effects of fuel price shocks, shipping demand shocks and shipping supply shocks on real dry bulk freight rates in the long run. We first analyse a new dataset on dry bulk freight rates for the period from 1850 to 2020, finding that they followed a downward but undulating path with a cumulative decline of 79%. Next, we turn to understanding the drivers of booms and busts in the dry bulk shipping industry, finding that shipping demand shocks strongly dominate all others as drivers of real dry bulk freight rates in the long run. Furthermore, while shipping demand shocks have increased in importance over time, shipping supply shocks in particular have become less relevant.