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What really caused Japan's Lost Decade? | 54 comments (54 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: What really caused Japan's Lost Decade? (none / 1)
Good points.

So, in effect, the failure to spread increasing productivity in agriculture to deep rural India and China is part of the problem...?

by Metatone (metatone [a|t] gmail (dot) com) on Wed Mar 24th, 2010 at 10:50:12 AM EST
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Re: What really caused Japan's Lost Decade? (4.00 / 3)
Quite ... maintaining existing income flows to vested interests has a higher priority than what is needed for agrarian growth.

Of course, those conditions when they happen are not necessarily deliberately planned that way.

Consider the agrarian revolution in Japan under the Shogunate, as a side effect of the system of having the Daimyo live in the capital every second year (to keep an eye on them) pushing them to encourage commercial and cash crop agricultural activity in order to have cash incomes to tax as opposed to the traditional payment of land tax in weight of rice.

Or the system of allowing coffee farmers on the large estates to grow crops alongside the coffee to avoid having to paying them subsistence, which laid the fuondation for much of Sao Paulo's progressive small farm sector.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Mar 24th, 2010 at 05:52:07 PM EST
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Re: What really caused Japan's Lost Decade? (4.00 / 2)
In Japan, the other key point to the flowering of peasant agricultural productivity was the fixed land tax rate for most of the Edo period.  As changing the taxes was too politically difficult for all but the first few shoguns, peasants on the Shogun's land were able to keep most any productivity improvements they made, be they from crop diversification to fertilizer to new rotations.  Over time, this led to

  1. increasing integration of the countryside into national networks of production and distribution, as peasants sold their leftover stuff to wholesale distributors in Osaka and Edo.

  2. a rural consumer revolution, as the money was used to buy stuff, replacing plain material want/crude homemade goods with superior product.

  3. the growth of rural industries, as farm families looked to plug their labor supply into these new market systems through handicraft production in a variety of traditional industries.

All this resulted in Japan having a rather highly developed capitalist economy over much of its territory well before the country was opened to the West.  Already having such an economy made it possible for Japan to adapt to the global markets of the 19th century.
by Zwackus on Fri Mar 26th, 2010 at 02:35:22 AM EST
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What really caused Japan's Lost Decade? | 54 comments (54 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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