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

Tomoko Hashino and Keijiro Otsuka ()

No 1501, Discussion Papers from Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University

Abstract: 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.

Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.kobe-u.ac.jp/RePEc/koe/wpaper/2015/1501.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:koe:wpaper:1501

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kimiaki Shirahama ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).