The countries of monsoon Asia - whose economies have traditionally depended on rice cultivation - face unique problems in economic development because of their weather. During a typical year, they experience six months of heavy rains followed by six months of relatively dry conditions. This alternation of wet and dry weather places unusual demands on the work force, which can be close to fully employed while the land is wet for rice cultivation but must seek other employment during the rest of the year. Although nations such as Japan have long been free from this cycle of low employment and low productivity, others still struggle with seemingly intractable problems. Offering a range of policy prescriptions, Harry Oshima focuses on how strategic processes - including full-employment strategies, education reform, technological development, capital formation, consumer spending and saving, and multicrop diversification - contribute to strengthening the developing economies of Asian nations affected by the monsoon season. Continuing the analysis he began in Economic Growth in Monsoon Asia, Oshima examines current data from highly successful monsoon-Asian nations like Japan, Taiwan, and Korea and compares their experiences to those of countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and India. His insights and conclusions will guide further development in this important region - and may offer lessons for developing nations in other parts of the world.
Setting / LocationGlobal
Story EraModern Era
Protagonist / CoreStrategic processes in monsoon Asia's economic development Lead Character
The paper analyzes the contribution of agriculture to economic growth. By employing cross-section data for the developing and developed countries during 1960-1970 and 1970-1979, it is found that in the context of Mr. Chenery-Syrquin's model intercountry variation in agricultural growth explains a significant portion of intercountry variation in the industrial (non-agricultural) growth. Further, in the context of an aggregate production function agricultural growth is found to contribute significantly to productivity increases and thus to overall economic growth. For the developing countries sample of the 1970-79 period, the results show that a one percent increase in agricultural growth leads to approximately four-tenths of a percentage point increase in productivity. It is also found that export growth contributes positively to productivity growth while the inflation rate contributes negatively.
This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the daughters and wives of the working poor and declasse elites, prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life, entering the historical record whenever others wanted to appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama. Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation.^ In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives.^ How can sources generated by intense public argument about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials: guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women, newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan house patrons, and interviews with former officials and reformers.^ Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech, Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.
"This book breaks new ground by introducing the concepts of product portfolio management and applying them to media companies in a comprehensive manner. It draws from knowledge and methods of analyzing product portfolio management in other industries, applies that knowledge to media industries, and analyzes current practices in media firms."--Jacket.
Making a strong case for the use of economic analysis in studying history and culture, Philip Hoffman shatters the widespread myth that traditional agricultural societies in early modern Europe were socially and economically stagnant - and ultimately depended on wide-scale political revolution for their growth. Through a richly detailed historical investigation of the peasant agriculture of ancien-regime France, the author uncovers evidence that requires a new understanding of what constituted economic growth in such societies. His arguments rest on a measurement of long-term growth that enables him to analyze the economic, institutional, and political factors that explain its forms and rhythms. . In comparing France with England and Germany, Hoffman arrives at fresh answers to some classic questions: Did French agriculture lag behind farming in other countries? If so, did the obstacles in French agriculture lurk within peasant society itself, in the peasants' culture, in their communal property rights, or in the small scale of their farms? Or did the obstacles hide elsewhere, in politics, in the tax system, or in meager opportunities for trade? The author discovers that growth cannot be explained by culture, property rights, or farm size, and argues that the real causes of growth derived from politics and gains from trade. By challenging other widely held beliefs, such as the nature of the commons and the workings of the rural economy, Hoffman offers a new analysis of peasant society and culture, one based on microeconomics and game theory and intended for a wide range of social scientists.
Strategic processes in monsoon Asia's economic development by Harry T. Oshima | Literally Just Books
