Economic Development and Labour Supply in Underdeveloped Regions: An Analysis of the Labour Supply of Domestic Servants in Northern Akita Prefecture, Japan, 1910–1924

In industrialising Japan, labour supplies depended on regional differences in economic development. Large parts of Japan were underdeveloped regions characterised by delayed industrialisation and relatively low agricultural productivity. However, little is known about how economic conditions affected labour supplies in such regions. To answer this question, I investigated the employment of domestic servants in northern Akita Prefecture, a typical underdeveloped region, from the 1910s to the early 1920s. Until the early 1910s, wealthy families in this region recruited daughters from peasant families as domestic servants at a low fixed wage. This indicates that the supply of labour was unlimited, as defined by W. Arthur Lewis. From the late 1910s to the early 1920s, however, this region achieved remarkable agricultural growth. As a result, peasant families could obtain almost the same amount of income by having daughters work on farms as by sending them elsewhere to work as domestic servants. Employers of domestic servants therefore offered higher wages to recruit workers. This implies that in the underdeveloped regions, what had been an unlimited supply of labour was transformed into a limited supply due to agricultural growth.