IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cge/wacage/749.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How did Japan catch-up with the West? Some implications of recent revisions to Japan’s historical growth record

Author

Listed:
  • Broadberry, Stephen

    (Nuffield College, Oxford)

  • Fukao, Kyoji

    (Hitotsubashi University)

  • Settsu, Tokihiko

    (Musashi University)

Abstract

This paper uses recently revised data on Japanese GDP to analyse the process by which Japan caught-up with the West. The new historical national accounts suggest that Japan was more than one-third richer in 1874 than suggested by Maddison, and that the Meiji period growth built on earlier development. We show that (1) despite trend GDP per capita growth during the Tokugawa shogunate, the catching-up process only started after 1890 with respect to Britain, and after World War 1 with respect to the United States and many European nations (2) although catching up was driven by the dynamic productivity performance of Japanese manufacturing, Japanese success in exporting manufactured goods was just as much driven by limiting the growth of real wages (3) despite claims that Japan was following a distinctive Asian path of labour-intensive industrialisation, capital played an important role in the catching-up process.

Suggested Citation

  • Broadberry, Stephen & Fukao, Kyoji & Settsu, Tokihiko, 2025. "How did Japan catch-up with the West? Some implications of recent revisions to Japan’s historical growth record," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 749, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cge:wacage:749
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/wp749.2025.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    JEL Classification:;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:cge:wacage:749. 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: Jane Snape (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaruk.html .

    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.