Money, credit and Smithian growth in Tokugawa Japan

Osamu Saito and Tokihiko Settsu

Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: In the latter half of the Tokugawa period economic growth, however sluggish its pace was, took place in the form of rural industrialisation and the expansion of inter-regional trade. This paper addresses the following questions: how capital was mobilised for such rural-centred growth in production and commerce, and how the quasi-capital markets worked in both the Osaka economy and in the countryside, with special reference to trends in interest rates over time, in a pre-modern setting of market segmentation. The paper will argue that although Tokugawa Japan's formal institutions were far from ideal, the credit systems did function as quasi-capital markets reasonably well within each commercial network formed through relational contracting, and that for the Smithian process of early modern growth to work, inter-regional competition mattered more than institutional maturity of the nation's market environment.

Date: 2006-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fmk, nep-his, nep-mac and nep-sea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hi-stat.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/research/discussion/2005/pdf/D05-139.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hst:hstdps:d05-139

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tatsuji Makino ().