The Rise and Fall of Industrialization and Changing Labor Intensity: The Case of Export-Oriented Silk Weaving District in Modern Japan

The production of simple silk fabric, called habutae or habutai, expanded rapidly from 1890 to the end of the 1910s in Fukui prefecture, and it was exported to Europe and the U.S. Habutae was initially woven by hand looms in cottage enterprises and, hence, its production was labor intensive. It gradually became capital intensive with the introduction of power looms since around 1905 but its production as well as export declined precipitously since the late 1910s. We attribute such rising and falling production and export to Japan fs changing comparative advantage of habutae production in international markets associated with changes in production technology from labor-using to capital-using direction.