A critical survey of recent research in Chinese economic history.

China is a resilient dinosaur. In contrast with so many other great empires in Eurasia – the Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Ottoman and Tsarist-Soviet – China has the longest history. The Empire kept expanding until the mid-nineteenth century when it practically reached the physical limits for a predominantly agrarian economy. The size and wealth of the Chinese economy, the variety of its produce and the degree of commercialisation and urbanisation made China one of the most popular international trading destinations from Roman times. With the rise of the opium trade in the early nineteenth century, however, the Chinese economy has been severely impoverished at least in relative terms. In response, since the 1870s, the Chinese sought to rescue their civilisation by adopting a wide range of foreign examples in social engineering for social experiments and reforms. Nevertheless, China's per capita GDP is still very low despite its political influence in the world since the 1970s. It is justifiable to view China as a case of growth failure in the recent centuries. The study of Chinese economic history has the same age as China's modern history itself. The field has been led and dominated by the West. Scholarly attempts have been made since the turn of this century to explain China's premodern success and its downfall after the Opium War. Two approaches can be identified: the 'Sinological approach' which refers to China only and the 'comparative method' which compares China with the West. The former tries to find out what achievements China managed to make and when and how it made them and the latter seeks to understand why premodern China was not industrialised.

Entrepreneurial profile of the UK in the light of the global entrepreneurship and development index

In this research summary, we provide a novel look into the entrepreneurial profile of the UK in an international context. We use a new method – the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index GEDI [1] – to identify the entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses of the UK economy, as well as to identify potential bottlenecks that hold back the performance of the UK relative to other advanced economies. We begin by providing an overview of the main findings

Colonial transition to modern economic growth in Korea and Taiwan

Rapid improvement in the living standards of Taiwan and South Korea during the recent decades is a familiar story. The economic development of the two countries in the first half of the 20th century is less known, however. Taiwan became a colony of Japan in 1895, and Korea in 1910. Using national income statistics, we argue that the Japanese colonial rule not only initiated the transition to modern economic growth, but also had lasting influence upon the post-colonial growth in Taiwan and South Korea. In order to understand the economic transformation of the two economies, we study the development policies of the Japanese colonial government. In discussing Korean development, we have taken advantage of the data availability to do growth accounting analysis. We identify key factors driving Korea out of secular stagnation and initiating the sustained growth. In the case of Taiwan, we compare the self-strengthening reform movement of late Ch’ing and the Japanese development policies, and try to identify the most important factors to development. In the following, we discuss the development of the two countires sequentially

Vote-Buying and Reciprocity

While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.vote-buying, reciprocity, redistributive politics, voting, social preferences

Territorialising Colonial Environments: A Comparison of Colonial Sciences on Land Demarcation in Japanese Taiwan and British Malaya

The thesis seeks to establish how far, and in what ways, colonial science articulates a distinctive mode of environmental conceptions and governance. It concerns the entanglement between the government, science, and knowledge. To examine how these combinations may vary it compares how land demarcation progressed in two different imperial territories: Japanese Taiwan (Formosa) and British Malaya. The discussion is based on this pair of case studies of environmental territorialisation, driven by imperial forces, whose legacy is still apparent today. The abrupt nineteenth-century colonial intrusion into these two sparsely populated areas, though occurring in different ways and scales, evoked a similarly dramatic landscape change from the centuries-old indigenous practice of subsistence activities. There are both similarities and considerable divergences referring to land classification in these two dependencies. In both cases most of the land was delineated as state-controlled forest reserve, which not only enhanced the revenue of government but also supplied the required timber or fuel resources. Another space delimited was aboriginal reservation that sustained the native subsistence or usufructory rights at least in part. By examining the genealogy and material discursive practices of territorialisation as they interacted with local environments and peoples the thesis offers a comparative account of the logics of different empires and the construction of territorial administration. It examines the political ecology of how colonial nature was produced as a resource, with the commodification of forest areas. It unpacks the two cases by studying the role of colonial science, especially cartographic practices, in demarcating and defining territories and peoples. It contrasts the state run surveys in Colonised Formosa with the networks of knowledge production in British Malaya

Entrepreneurial Diversity and Economic Growth

Most studies investigating the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth treat entrepreneurs as a homogeneous group. This study investigates the impact of entrepreneurial diversity on national economic growth. Using data for 36 countries participating in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor we investigate whether the impact on growth depends on socio-demographic diversity in entrepreneurship (in terms of age, education and gender). We find that in less developed countries older and higher educated entrepreneurs are particularly important for stimulating economic growth, while for developed countries younger entrepreneurs are more important. Accordingly, policy should aim at stimulating particular groups of entrepreneurs, rather than just the number of entrepreneurs.entrepreneurship;diversity;economic development

Types of Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth

In this paper, we empirically investigate the effect of entrepreneurship on economic growth at the country level. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which provides comparative data on entrepreneurship from a wide range of countries. An important element of this paper is that we compare the effects of entrepreneurial activity on economic growth in high income, transition and low income countries. This dataset also enables us to make a distinction between the effects of entrepreneurship in general and growth-oriented entrepreneurship in particular. We present empirical tests of the impact of entrepreneurial activity on GDP growth over a four year period for a sample of 36 countries. Our empirical analyses suggest that entrepreneurship does not have an effect on economic growth in low income countries, in contrast to transition and high income countries where especially growth-oriented entrepreneurship seems to contribute strongly to macroeconomic growthentrepreneurship, growth-oriented entrepreneurship, economic growth

China's Island Frontier: Studies in the Historical Geography of Taiwan

Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon FoundationUntil the seventeenth century, Professor Knapp reminds us, Taiwan lay obscure off the southeast coast of China-an island cloaked in anonymity and inhabited principally by aborigines. Then, rather abruptly, the island was thrust into the maelstrom of European commercial expansion in East Asia, which in its wake drew Chinese peasant pioneers across the straits to Taiwan. This is the story, told from many viewpoints, of how Taiwan was transformed over a period of three centuries from a raw frontier to a stable entity with social and economic patterns similar to those found along the coastal mainland of southeastern China

Socio-demographic and health-related factors associated with cognitive impairment in the elderly in Taiwan

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cognitive impairment is an age-related condition as the rate of cognitive decline rapidly increases with aging. It is especially important to better understand factors involving in cognitive decline for the countries where the older population is growing rapidly. The aim of this study was to examine the association between socio-demographic and health-related factors and cognitive impairment in the elderly in Taiwan.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We analysed data from 2119 persons aged 65 years and over who participated in the 2005 National Health Interview Survey. Cognitive impairment was defined as having the score of the Mini Mental State Examination lower than 24. The χ²test and multiple logistic regression models were used to evaluate the association between cognitive impairment and variables of socio-demography, chronic diseases, geriatric conditions, lifestyle, and dietary factors.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The prevalence of cognitive impairment was 22.2%. Results of multivariate analysis indicated that low education, being single, low social support, lower lipid level, history of stroke, physical inactivity, non-coffee drinking and poor physical function were associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Most of the characteristics in relation to cognitive impairment identified in our analysis are potentially modifiable. These results suggest that improving lifestyle behaviours such as regular exercise and increased social participation could help prevent or decrease the risk of cognitive impairment. Further investigations using longitudinal data are needed to clarify our findings.</p