Abstract
The institutions of the pre-industrial Japanese economy have typically been portrayed as feudal and subsistence-based, yet it is now clear that they did not inhibit output growth or the spread of the market, even if they certainly conditioned their nature. Households were clearly practising population control, in the interests of maintaining/improving their living standards, and utilising markets in wage-labour and rented land to the same end; the persistence of small-scale, household-based cultivation, within strong village units, did not prevent technical change and output growth in agriculture, nor preclude involvement with product and labour markets, if in distinctive ways; sophisticated market-based institutions and practices developed in finance and credit, the distribution system and the coordination of household-based, proto-industrial producers. Thus, it appears that an institutional structure sustaining Smithian growth came to develop in Japan, even if differing in its characteristics and effects from its European counterparts.
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Francks, P. (2016). Institutions and the Market. In: Japan and the Great Divergence. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57673-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57673-6_7
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