IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palscp/978-1-137-57673-6_7.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Institutions and the Market

In: Japan and the Great Divergence

Author

Listed:
  • Penelope Francks

    (University of Leeds)

Abstract

The institutions of the pre-industrial Japanese economy have typically been portrayed as feudal and subsistence-based, yet it is now clear that they did not inhibit output growth or the spread of the market, even if they certainly conditioned their nature. Households were clearly practising population control, in the interests of maintaining/improving their living standards, and utilising markets in wage-labour and rented land to the same end; the persistence of small-scale, household-based cultivation, within strong village units, did not prevent technical change and output growth in agriculture, nor preclude involvement with product and labour markets, if in distinctive ways; sophisticated market-based institutions and practices developed in finance and credit, the distribution system and the coordination of household-based, proto-industrial producers. Thus, it appears that an institutional structure sustaining Smithian growth came to develop in Japan, even if differing in its characteristics and effects from its European counterparts.

Suggested Citation

  • Penelope Francks, 2016. "Institutions and the Market," Palgrave Studies in Economic History, in: Japan and the Great Divergence, chapter 0, pages 57-78, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-1-137-57673-6_7
    DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-57673-6_7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-1-137-57673-6_7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.