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Land, labour and market forces in Tokugawa Japan
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| Tokugawa Japan was a land of peasants who accounted for 80 per cent of the population. This percentage may suggest that land was hardly a commodity while the size of the workforce in industry and trade was small. Under Tokugawa rule (1603-1868) institutional frameworks for land and labour markets were never favourable for the flexible use of land and people as factors of production. However, given a recent consensus that Tokugawa Japan achieved Smithian growth, a gradual process of market-led output growth, with rural industrialisation and agricultural improvements as major engines of progress, how could such a picture of factor markets be consistent with the rural-centred growth scenario? In order to answer this question, the paper will go over land and labour markets in traditional Japan. It will be shown that the market size for both land and labour was actually small, yet that the factor markets that existed functioned well, so well that market forces must have played an indispensable part in the process of Tokugawa Japan's Smithian growth.
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| This paper was published in Continuity and Change Vol.24, Issue 1 (May 2009), pp.169-196. |
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| Copyright (C) 2003 by Institute of Economic
Research.All rights reserved. |
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