Jean-Pascal Bassino

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

This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares 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 north-western Europe. Real wages stagnated in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, with little cumulative change for 200 years. The income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long-run stagnation in China combined with industrialization in Japan and Europe.

Economic transformation and biological welfare in colonial Burma: Regional differentiation in the evolution of average height

Did economic development result in an improvement in biological welfare in the tropics before the diffusion of modern public health techniques in the 1950s and 1960s? Between the mid-19th and early 20th century, Lower Burma experienced a rapid rise in population and became increasingly commercialized as a major rice exporter. Land reclamation on a massive scale in the Irrawaddy delta required an arduous process of jungle clearance, land drainage and preparation, and canal and bund construction, mostly in malarial swamps. Once paddy lands were created, rice was grown with rudimentary tools in malarial zones. By contrast, in most parts of Upper Burma the economy remained more subsistence-oriented, and less commercialized. In this paper, we investigate changes in physical stature by processing and analyzing data reported in two anthropometric surveys conducted in various regions of Upper and Lower Burma in 1904 and in 1938-1941. An inverted U curve is observed in the evolution of average height in Lower Burma, while stature remained fairly stable in Upper Burma until the 1930s.

Do Japanese MNCs Use Expatriates to Contain Risk in Asian Host Countries

We investigate the impact of host-country risk on the expatriation strategies of multinational firms, using data on Japanese subsidiary firms in manufacturing industries in 13 host countries in Asia. We find that country risk is negatively correlated with the degree of expatriation and that, rather than host-country risk, firm-specific factors (particularly capital intensity, ownership share of parent firms in subsidiaries and the age of the venture) explain most of the variation in the degree to which subsidiaries rely on Japanese expatriates. Contrary to previous studies, the capital intensity of production is a key explanatory firm-specific variable that correlates positively with the degree of expatriation. Japanese multinational companies do not rely on expatria127=tes to off-set host-country risk, but to mitigate risk to parent investment in subsidiaries.

The evolution of Japanese business networks in ASEAN countries since the 1960s

Our study relies on micro-data obtained from the Toyo Keizai (TKZ) annual survey for analyzing the characteristics and evolution of network structures among Japanese manufacturing overseas subsidiaries since the 1960s. We focus on five ASEAN countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand -- that have been among the main recipients of Japanese foreign direct investment since the 1960s, along with Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States (and China from the 1980s). The aim of our study is to assess to what extent the Japanese business network structures in ASEAN countries replicated network structures existing in Japan in the same period, and evolved in the same manner. The TKZ database reports micro-data for several thousands Japanese overseas subsidiaries, either wholly owned companies or joint ventures with local partners. Available information enables identifying Japanese and non-Japanese shareholders, and the percentage of paid-up capital owned by each firm. Local partner companies were almost exclusively owned and operated by ethnic Chinese family-based networks (see for instance Suehiro (1992) on postwar Thailand). Ethnic Chinese business networks, initially specialized in trade, finance, and commodity processing, diversified their activities in the postwar period and played a major role in the development of the manufacturing sector in these ASEAN countries since the 1960s. The Chinese diaspora in ASEAN countries mainly originates from late 19th and early 20th century migrations from Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Therefore, we do not expect possible differences in the role of local partners of Japanese networks to be influenced by local cultural values but rather by local conditions, in particular ethnic tensions, political unrest, and sub-optimal institutions; and, in the case of the Philippines, national policies discouraging Japanese investment (Bassino and Williamson 2015). The motivation for comparing Japanese networks in ASEAN countries and in Japan is related to one of the most hotly disputed issues in postwar Japan business history, namely the strength of postwar linkages between companies that belonged to one of the prewar conglomerates owned by kinship networks (i.e. zaibatsu such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, dissolved in 1946 upon request of the U.S. occupation authorities). The major part of the academic community in the fields of management and industrial organization considers that the links between former zaibatsu companies remain strong in Japan during the postwar period and can be identified through information on main-bank, cross-ownership, and transactions (e.g. Gerlach 1992; Aoki and Saxonhouse 2000). This stream of literature also argues that the reconstitution of zaibatsu as so-called “horizontal keiretsu” (literally, keiretsu means “economic line-ups”) in the 1950s and their persistence in the following decades relied on strong non-kinship interpersonal relationships among managers of the companies. Miwa and Ramseyer (Miwa and Ramseyer 2002; Ramseyer 2006) challenge this claim that they describe as an ideological construct devised by Japanese Marxists in the 1950s, later adopted by the Dodwell, a marketing company, and finally by non-Marxist scholars. They argue that the empirical evidence supporting the keiretsu hypothesis is weak. Our study tests the keiretsu hypothesis using data for ASEAN countries.