Money, credit and Smithian growth in Tokugawa Japan

In the latter half of the Tokugawa period economic growth, however sluggish its pace was, took place in the form of rural industrialisation and the expansion of inter-regional trade. This paper addresses the following questions: how capital was mobilised for such rural-centred growth in production and commerce, and how the quasi-capital markets worked in both the Osaka economy and in the countryside, with special reference to trends in interest rates over time, in a pre-modern setting of market segmentation. The paper will argue that although Tokugawa Japan's formal institutions were far from ideal, the credit systems did function as quasi-capital markets reasonably well within each commercial network formed through relational contracting, and that for the Smithian process of early modern growth to work, inter-regional competition mattered more than institutional maturity of the nation's market environment.

Unveiling Historical Occupational Structures and its Implications for Sectoral Labour Productivity Analysis in Japan's Economic Growth

This paper aims to offer new estimates of gainfully occupied workers in Japan between 1885 and 1940. The estimates are made by taking explicitly widespread farm-family by-employment into account, and then they will be allocated into the primary, secondary and tertiary (PST) sectors. With the new workforce statistics and revised estimates of net output in the tertiary sector for the same period, we would also like to examine the levels of differentials in average labour productivity between the three sectors. The paper will show that labour productivity differentials between agriculture and manufacturing in early stages of Japan's industrialisation were not as wide as both Gerschenkronian and dual structurist arguments tended to assume for late industrialisers.

Tuomi Logistiikan taloustiimin perehdytyksen kehittäminen

Tuomi Logistiikka Oy on Tampereen kaupungin ja Pirkanmaan sairaanhoitopiirin omistama hankinta- ja logistiikkayhtiö. Yhtiön tukipalveluiden yhtenä osa-alueena toimii taloustiimi, joka koostuu talouspäälliköstä, controllerista, assistant controllerista ja talousassistenteista. Taloustiimin keskuudessa oli lähtötilanteessa paljon hiljaista tietoa, eikä kirjallisia työohjeita ollut. Materiaalien ja näkyvien käytänteiden puuttuessa perehdyttäminen koettiin hankalaksi ja laadultaan epätasaiseksi. Perehdytyksen toteutustapa, muodot ja sisältö vaihtelivat tilanteesta toiseen ja olivat riippuvaisia perehdytyksen toteuttamisesta vastuussa olleen henkilön omista tottumuksista ja työtavoista. Tämän toiminnallisen opinnäytetyön tarkoituksena oli kirjoittaa puuttuvia työohjeita taloustiimin talousassistentin tehtäviin. Tarkoituksena oli myös luoda tiimille intranet, johon tarvittavat työohjeet kerättiin. Opinnäytetyön tavoitteena oli kehittää taloustiimin työntekijöiden perehdytystä ja sitä kautta kehittää osaamista ja työn tuloksellisuutta. Opinnäytetyön aluksi kerättiin taloustiimin työntekijöiltä tietoa heidän perehdytyksestään sekä kehittämiskohteista. Tiedonkeruu suoritettiin keskustellen ja sähköpostin välityksellä. Intranet luotiin alisivustona yrityksen yhteiseen intranettiin. Taloustiimin intranet luotiin visuaalisesti yhteneväksi Tuomi Logistiikan yhteisen intranetin kanssa. Intranettiin luotiin seuraavat osiot: taloustiimin esittely, ilmoitukset, uutiset, linkit, yhteystiedot, laskutuksen ohjeet ja HR-ohjeet. Puuttuvat työohjeet kirjoitettiin sähköiseen muotoon ja kerättiin intranettiin kaikkien saataville.Tuomi Logistiikka Oy provides procurement and logistics services to the owners: the City of Tampere and the Pirkanmaa Hospital District. The financial team is part of the support services in the company, consisting of professionals such as the financial manager, a controller, an assistant controller and assistants. There was a lot of tacit knowledge in the financial team but shortage of documents, written instructions and guidance. The lack of directions, formal guidelines and conventions caused difficulties in briefing and coaching the employees. The quality, methods, forms and contents of briefing and coaching varied a lot and depended on the person who was responsible for training a new employee. Personal habits, practices, understanding and impressions determined what was taught, when and how. It was obvious that this was an inefficient, inadequate and prolonged way of training. The purpose of this study was to collect all the essential, but too fragmentary information and write down the missing instructions and guidelines for the financial assistant’s job. Another purpose of this study was to develop the internal website (intranet) for the financial team of Tuomi Logistiikka. All the instructions and documents were supposed to be easily found on the new intranet. The aim of this study was to develop the orientation and training of the employees within the team and thereby increase professional skills and productivity. The financial team’s intranet was visually and functionally modified to be an essential part of the company’s main intranet. The new intranet includes the following substance sections: the introduction of the financial team, notifications, news,links, contact information, invoicing instructions and guidelines for human resources

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.

Regional Inequality and Migration in Prewar Japan

Abstract We analyze the changing patterns of regional inequality during the initial phase of Japanese industrialization on the basis of new estimates of industry-level Japanese GDP constructed for the benchmark years 1890, 1909, 1925, 1935, and 1940 for each of the 47 prefectures. No "Kuznets" inverted U-curve is observed during the period in terms of the coefficient of variation of prefecture-level per capita GDP, but rather a slow decline, reflecting a contraction in within-industry productivity across prefectures. We also estimate in-and out-migration by prefecture and find that sizable population flows took place from the poorest rural areas to the industrializing urban areas. We estimate the contribution of changes in productivity, industrial structure, and population to the observed convergence and find that internal migration played an important role, as it did during the two decades of high-speed economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s

Unveiling Historical Occupational Structures and its Implications for Sectoral Labour Productivity Analysis in Japan's Economic Growth

This paper aims to offer new estimates of gainfully occupied workers in Japan between 1885 and 1940. The estimates are made by taking explicitly widespread farm-family by-employment into account, and then they will be allocated into the primary, secondary and tertiary (PST) sectors. With the new workforce statistics and revised estimates of net output in the tertiary sector for the same period, we would also like to examine the levels of differentials in average labour productivity between the three sectors. The paper will show that labour productivity differentials between agriculture and manufacturing in early stages of Japan's industrialisation were not as wide as both Gerschenkronian and dual structurist arguments tended to assume for late industrialisers.グローバルCOEプログラム = Global COE Program29 p

Structural Change, Capital Deepening, and TFP Growth in Japan: 1885-1970

日本経済は1868年の明治維新以降，アジアで最初に近代経済成長を開始し，第二次世界大戦後の高度成長期を経て，1970年ごろには欧州の主要国にほぼ追いついた．戦前の経済成長率は西欧諸国とほぼ同水準であったものの，高度成長期に急激な産業構造の変化を伴いながら，アメリカ・イギリスの4倍という高い成長率を達成したことが，このようなキャッチアップを可能とした．本論文では，このおよそ100年間に及ぶ経済成長の過程を，近年整備された新たなGDP推計にもとづき，成長会計の手法を用いて分析する．特に，産業構造の変化，すなわち資源の再配分の効果が，経済成長にどのような影響を与えたのかを明らかにするべく，第一次産業と非第一次産業に分けて分析を試みた．我々の分析の結果，以下の知見を得た．戦前の第一次産業は，企業勃興期から第一次世界大戦ブーム期にかけて労働生産性の上昇が著しかったが，同期間の前半部分においては， TFPの上昇がその主要因となっていたのに対し，後半部分については労働者1人あたり資本ストックおよび耕地面積の寄与が相対的に大きかった．非第一次産業では，戦前期のほぼ全期間を通じて，TFPの上昇が労働生産性上昇を説明する主要因であった．戦後については，高度成長の源泉はTFPの上昇と労働者1人あたり資本ストックの増加の寄与であったが，その上昇率は非第一次産業で圧倒的に大きかった．また，これらの成長要因と比較すると，資源の再配分効果は限定的なものであった．After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan modernized its institutions and economic growth gradually picked up. Growth accelerated especially during the so-called high-speed growth era from 1955 to 1970, when Japan rapidly caught up with Western economies. The long-term sustained high-speed growth recorded during this period was unprecedented not only in Japan but worldwide. While other East Asian countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and China subsequently also experienced remarkable growth over a prolonged period, Japan’s place in history as the first country to record such sustained high-speed growth means that its experience continues to garner worldwide interest. Using newly constructed Hitotsubashi estimates of Japan’s historical GDP statistics and a growth accounting flamework, we analyze the sources of Japan’s economic growth from 1885 to 1970 and try to answer why Japan was not able accomplish such high-speed growth before 1955. Since until the mid-1960s the primary sector accounted for a large share of economic activity and was a major determinant of overall economic growth, we use a Hayashi and Prescott (2008) type two-sector model in which the economy overall is divided into the primary sector and the non-primary sector23