Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

The aim of the article is to identify the factors that prevented British aircraft manufacturers from investing in Australia in the second half of the 1930s, a period when rearmament was creating demand for aircraft. The article looks at several unsuccessful proposals by British manufacturers to establish factories in Australia to build aircraft in the late 1930s, with additional attention being given to one proposal in particular. There is evidence that the Australian Government favoured the creation of an Australian-owned industry building aircraft under licence to foreign manufacturers, and it was this factor that largely deterred British investors.

This article tests for the presence of a tariff-growth correlation among the seven tariff-autonomous colonies of late-nineteenth-century Australasia, making use of several colony-specific macroeconomic series that have only recently become available. Introducing tariffs to a convergence model yields no evidence of an association between tariffs and growth among the Australasian colonies. This finding is unaltered when the tariff variable is replaced by a purposefully constructed proxy variable for the tariff on manufactures specifically. Additionally, this article finds little evidence that tariffs induced an intersectoral adjustment into manufacturing.

This paper discusses export development in New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s with reference to the long-running literature about the sustainability of natural resource-based growth, export diversification, and the role of state regulation and encouragement. Since 1970 New Zealand's export commodity mix has diversified. Pastoral exports, once dominant, are complemented by seafood, wine, fruit, vegetables, forest products and a range of manufactured goods. Diversification of export markets and commodities was a priority for policymakers from the mid-1950s, and more so from the mid-1970s. Export incentives were a chosen instrument. Seafood and kiwifruit were among the most significant examples of primary sector diversification. The paper finds that the circumstances of each industry required different government policies, and that entrepreneurship and innovation were significant alongside government policy.

In the pre-1914 era Australia did not develop an ocean-going merchant navy. The problem is well recognised in previous studies that assumed that it was high Australian wages that made the operational cost of deep-sea vessels uncompetitive on a global scale. This article reconstructs historical shifts in the Australian market for a seagoing workforce and demonstrates there was low recruitment of Australian labour. Drawing on new sources and inspired by efficiency wage theory the article argues that it was this shortage of a domestic labour supply that constrained the development of a national deep-sea shipping industry.

Despite the existence of a rich literature on Chinese partial household division, there is still limited evidence of its effect on land and capital accumulation and well-being. In this study, contrary to the dominant view, we find that household property size peaked around 1800s–1830s, suggesting that equal-share system did not necessarily lead to land fragmentation. We find evidence that this rise in farm sizes is related to the opposing forces of increased well-being and increased inequality.

Before the 1960s, North Korea's GDP per capita was 30%–50% higher than South Korea's due to industrialisation during the 1930s. However, the governments of the two Koreas pursued different goals in the 1960s, which resulted in a reversal. The South Korean government made economic growth its ultimate goal. They did this by self-implementing, adjusting and instituting an export-oriented development strategy. On the other hand, the North Korean government tried to maximise its ability to survive by sacrificing gains from economies of scale. These differences brought about remarkable differences in economic performance. The gap between the two economies has continued to grow since the income level reversal in the 1970s.

Despite slow development of Thai economic history scholarship, research output in the last three decades has shed new light and improved arguments on classic debates using novel primary sources and quantitative methods. This article traces the evolution of three Thai economic history debates from the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (1) factors behind Thailand's slow economic growth; (2) the reluctance of rural workers to move into urban employment; and (3) the Thai government's failure to invest in large-scale irrigation projects. The article concludes with a discussion of current challenges facing Thai economic history research and suggestions to move the discipline forward.

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.