Rich and slim, but relatively short Explaining the halt in the secular trend in Japan

An almost complete halt in the secular trend in stature at a relatively low level is observed in Japan since the late 1980s with average height of around 171 cm for males and 158 cm for females at age 18. Unidentified characteristics in the Japanese genetic pool or in the nutritional intake do not provide a convincing explanation. Japan is unique among OECD countries in combining contrasted health outcomes: a stagnation of height suggests a decline in biological well-being, but this picture is not consistent with high life expectancy and extremely low prevalence of infant mortality, overweight/obesity, and other pathologies. Individual data that could allow investigating the influence of socio-economic and other environmental conditions are unavailable. As a second best, we take advantage of the regional variance in average height and other indicators across the 47 Japanese prefectures and use data covering the period 1950-2005. A positive and significant influence of income and housing conditions on height is identified but the effect is fading. Caloric restraint of pregnant women, and the decrease in sleeping time observed since the 1980s appear as possible explanatory variables of the halt in the secular trend and a symptom of a decline in well-being. Public health policy implications are considered.height, income, housing, sleep, sexual dimorphism, Japan

Michelin Franck, La guerre du Pacifique a commencé en Indochine : 1940-1941

Le titre de l’ouvrage énonce d’emblée la thèse avancée par Franck Michelin. La démonstration est entreprise en mobilisant un volume impressionnant de sources souvent inédites ou peu connues et d’un grand nombre de travaux publiés en langues occidentales et en japonais. Cette abondance donne une qualité exceptionnelle à son étude, qui associe les approches et méthodes de l’histoire politico-diplomatique et celles de l’histoire militaire, avec également une certaine prise en compte des question..

Rice Cultivation in Southern Vietnam (1880-1954) : A Re-evaluation of Land Productivity in Asian Perspective

The conventional interpretation of Asia\u27s agricultural transformation during the 20th century is that land productivity and land/labor ratios, which were both initially comparatively low, increased as a result of technological change. Data available for a number of Asian countries have usually been interpreted as showing as a land-replacing path described as the \u27Ishikawa-curve\u27 (Ishikawa 1981). However, as Van der Eng (2004) has shown, Ishikawa\u27s interpretation is biased towards East Asia, providing an adequate description of the experience of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea but not of the mainland Southeast Asian countries. He produces evidence that the land/labor ratio was much lower in Japan than in Mainland Southeast Asia. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the yield series implied by late 19th century official sources and by micro-data collected by the French colonial administration, and to propose a re-evaluation of paddy output. The results show that, in southern Vietnam, initial conditions were not only characterized by high land/labor ratios but also by comparatively high land productivity, and therefore high level of labor productivity. It appears, therefore, that the path of southern Vietnam\u27s transformation of rice cultivation differs markedly from the received wisdom expressed by the \u27Ishikawa-curve\u27

Cross-Border Data Exchanges : The Rise of Platform Economy in Asia

International audienceTransnational flows of goods, capital, and labor are accurately monitored, and are included by governmental agencies in their economic metrics as critical information used by policy makers. Although transnational flows of data can be intuitively identified as equally important, they have been so far largely ignored by economists and are poorly monitored by public authorities. In this paper, we study the extent to which local and foreign intermediation platforms in Asia have developed their activities in Asia, and their contribution to cross-border data exchanges. We rely on preliminary measure of transnational as well as global data exchanges in Asia. We identify various patterns; China is mostly relying on national platforms, while Japan is highly dependent from platforms based in the United States, Korea and Taiwan are experiencing some sort of balance between national and foreign platforms

Regional Inequality and Industrial Structures in Pre-War Japan: An Analysis Based on New Prefectural GDP Estimates

Studies comparing regional income in Japan before and after World War II have frequently drawn a picture of radical change from an economy characterized by large regional disparities to one characterized by small regional disparities. This paper comes to a very different conclusion. Based on estimates of prefecture-level value added for five benchmark years from 1890 to 1940 (a detailed description of our estimation methodology is provided), we examine trends in the gap of economic development between prefectures during the pre-war period and find that this gap was much smaller than claimed in preceding studies and, in fact, not much greater than during the post-war period. Observing, moreover, a decline in inter-prefectural differences in terms of per-capita gross value added during the pre-war period, we conduct a factor analysis and find that a major reason for this decline was a decline in inter-prefectural differences in same-industry labor productivity. Thus, the picture of modern Japan's economic development presented here is very different from the one painted by preceding studies.

Global context and European motivations for the EU-Japan Partnership Agreement（EPA）

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Wages, prices, and living standards in China, 1738-1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India

The paper develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth and compare them with leading cities in Europe, Japan and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe but far behind that in the leading economies in northwestern Europe. Real wages declined in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth with little cumulative change for two hundred years. The income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long run stagnation in China combined with industrialization in Japan and Europe.

Japan and the great divergence, 730–1874

Despite being the first Asian economy to achieve modern economic growth, Japan has received relatively little attention in the Great Divergence debate. New estimates suggest that although the level of GDP per capita remained below the level of northwest Europe throughout the period 730–1874, Japan experienced positive trend growth before 1868, in contrast to the negative trend growth experienced in China and India, leading to a Little Divergence within Asia. However, growth in Japan remained slower than in northwest Europe so that Japan continued to fall behind until after the institutional reforms of the early Meiji period. The Great Divergence thus occurred as the most dynamic part of Asia fell behind the most dynamic part of Europe