Gregg Huff

Financing Japan's World War II Occupation of Southeast Asia

This article analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the market-purchased transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. Occupation was financed principally by printing large quantities of money. While some Southeast Asian countries had high inflation, hyperinflation hardly occurred because of a sustained transactions demand for money and because of Japans strong enforcement of monetary monopoly. Highly specialized Southeast Asian economies and loss of Japanese merchant shipping limited resource extraction.

Finance and Long-Term Development Issues in Southeast Asia

This article analyses Southeast Asian finance over more than a century in light of three issues: the realisation of finance-leading development; indigenous entrepreneurship; and effective credit provision in rural areas. Colonial currency board systems and non-interventionist government characterised finance in pre-World War II Southeast Asia. There was decisive change after independence to a variety of state-directed, or indeed socialist, attempts to overcome unfavourable pre-war development legacies. Despite these departures, the article finds that throughout Southeast Asian history, finance rarely, if ever, led development. Today, indigenous entrepreneurship, explored for Malaysia, is generally either bolstered by political patrons or even entirely substituted for by state finance. More positively, market-aware state initiatives in microfinance may offer a realistic institutional alternative to rural Southeast Asias historic reliance on informal finance.

Export-led Growth, Gateway Cities and Urban Systems Development in Pre-World War II Southeast Asia

Abstract Between the 1870s and World War II, falls in world shipping costs and Western industrialisation gave rise to export-led Southeast Asian growth and specialisation in a narrow range of primary commodity exports. A linked development was the emergence of a few dominant Southeast Asian urban centres, typically primate and always ports. Drawing on historical census data, this article uses rank-size distributions and transition matrices to investigate the influence of commodity specialisation and exports on urban systems development in the region. It is argued that different commodities produced different spread effects, resulting in variation in degrees of urban concentration in the region. However, geography, path dependence and infrastructure also shaped urban systems development. The main cities that emerged during this period became the ‘gateways’ that connected frontier Southeast Asia to the global economy. Cities dominant in 1939 retain this status in todays Southeast Asia.

The Shipping Conference System, Empire and Local Protest in Singapore, 1910–1911

ABSTRACT This article analyses local opposition in Singapore in 1910–11 to the shipping conference system and the responses of a powerful group of British shipowners and the Colonial Office. The conference, a cartel agreed among shipowners, divided monopoly profits among its members and a small group of London-based merchant houses. We suggest that the concerns of Singapore anti-conference protestors, backed by the governor of the Straits Settlements, counted for little in official London circles when weighed against the vital role of shipping in the British Empire. Even in 1967 the strength of the empire and British shipping was still apparent when the Singapore government refused to support local mercantile opposition to the Far Eastern Freight Conference.

The Challenge of Finance in South East Asia during the Second World War

This article analyses finance in South East Asia during the Second World War in terms of three challenges. Beginning in December 1941, Japan swiftly occupied South East Asia and immediately faced the challenge of how to finance occupation. Finance largely through printing money gave rise to a further challenge in the need to avoid hyperinflationary pressures. After the war the reoccupying powers faced their own, and a third, challenge of wartime finance in deciding how to deal with a large stock of money created during the conflict. Comparison with war finance elsewhere shows that the three challenges were met in sometimes unusual but rather effective ways.

Financing Japan’s World War II Occupation of Southeast Asia

This paper analyzes how Japan financed its World War II occupation of Southeast Asia, the transfer of resources to Japan, and the monetary and inflation consequences of Japanese policies. In Malaya, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines, the issue of military scrip to pay for resources and occupying armies greatly increased money supply. Despite high inflation, hyperinflation hardly occurred because of a sustained transactions demand for money, because of Japans strong enforcement of monetary monopoly, and because of declining Japanese military capability to ship resources home. In Thailand and Indochina, occupation costs and bilateral clearing arrangements created near open-ended Japanese purchasing power and allowed the transfer to Japan of as much as a third of Indochinas annual GDP. Although the Thai and Indochinese governments financed Japanese demands mainly by printing large quantities of money, inflation rose only in line with monetary expansion due to moneys continued use as a store of value in rice-surplus areas.

The Japanese Occupation of South East Asia during the Second World War

This article reviews recent Japanese- and English-language publications to assess scholarly interchange between the two languages and the effects on South East Asia of Japans Second World War occupation. The economic and social impact on Borneo, Malaya and Singapore of the Japanese interregnum was devastating. In Burma and Indonesia, military training given by the Japanese fundamentally shaped the post-war order. The authors find surprisingly little cross-over between those writing in Japanese or in English and argue that greater academic exchange, possibly facilitated through translation, would enhance understanding of wartime South East Asia.