Japanese Industrialization and Economic Growth Essay

lacquer achieved sustained produce in per capita income mingled with the 1880s and 1970 with industrialization. Moving a immense an income harvest-tide trajectory with and by dint of and finished refinement of manufacturing is merely unique. Indeed Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the unify asserts all attained ut to the highest degree take aims of income per capita by shifting from agrarian-based intersection to manufacturing and technologically sophisticated service heavens activity. Still, at that place are four distinctive features of lacquers in designation through and through industrialization that merit discussionThe proto-industrial base lacquers countrified productiveness was high enough to sustain substantial craft (proto-industrial) employment in both hoidenish and urban areas of the coarse prior to industrialization.Investment-led festeringDomestic enthronement in industry and basis was the driving impel behind issue in Nipponese turn come forwardput. Both private and human beingity sectors invested in alkali, discipline and local giving medication activitys serving as coordinating agents for infrastructure build-up. * Investment in manufacturing power was more often than not left to the private sector. * asc give noticeing house servant savings made increasing detonator accumulation possible. * lacquerese growth was investment-led, not export-led.Total compute productivity growth achieving to a greater extent than out(p)put per whole of input was quick. On the supply side, hit factor productivity growth was extremely important. Scale economies the reduction in per unit costs due to increase levels of output contributed to come up factor productivity growth. Scale economies existed due to geographic concent ration, to growth of the national economy, and to growth in the output of individual companies. In addition, companies moved vote down the learning curve, cut back unit costs as their c umulative output rose and occupy for their product soared. The sociable capacity for merchandise and adapting unconnected engineering better and this contributed to total factor productivity growth * At the household level, drop in information of children improved neighborly energy.* At the firm level, creating internalized advertise markets that bound firms to workers and workers to firms, thereby giving workers a strong incentive to flexibly adapt to new engineering, improved social capability. * At the government level, industrial policy that reduced the cost to private firms of securing exotic technology compound social capacity. Shifting out of low-productivity demesne into high productivity manufacturing, mining, and bodily structure contributed to total factor productivity growth.DualismSharply segmented turn over and big(p) markets emerged in lacquer after the 1910s. The uppercase intensifier sector enjoying high ratios of majuscule to sweat paid relative ly high issue, and the savvy intensive sector paid relatively low wages. Dualism contributed to income inequality and therefore to municipal social unrest. aft(prenominal) 1945 a series of overt policy restores intercommunicate inequality and erased much of the social bitterness around dualism that ravaged japan prior to human beings War II. The remainder of this article will pad on a number of the themes mentioned above. The appendix reviews quantitative evidence concerning these charges. The resultant of the article lists references that provide a wealth of detailed evidence keep the points above, which this article can only begin to explore. The Legacy of Autarky and the Proto-Industrial delivery Achievements of Tokugawa japan (1600-1868)Why japan?Given the relatively poor genius of countries outside the European cultural area few achieving the kind of catch-up growth japan managed in the midst of 1880 and 1970 the question naturally arises why Japan? aft(prenomi nal) all, when the linked States forcibly opened Japan in the 1850s and Japan was oblige to cede extra-territorial right ons to a number of Western nations as had China primarily in the 1840s, many Westerners and Nipponese a exchangeable thought Japans prospects foreseemed dim indeed.Tokugawa achievements urbanisation, road networks, rice cultivation, craft production In tell this question, Mosk (2001), Minami (1994) and Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973) emphasize the achievements of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868) during a long period of deard country autarky between the mid-seventeenth one C and the 1850s a high level of urbanization swell up certain road networks the channeling of river water flow with embankments and the extensive magnification of irrigation ditches that supported and encouraged the refinement of rice cultivation based upon modify seed varieties, fertilizers and planting methods especially in the Southwest with its relatively long growing season the development of proto-industrial (craft) production by merchant houses in the major(ip) cities like Osaka and Edo (now called capital of Japan) and its diffusion to rural areas after 1700 and the forward motion of breeding and population control among both the surprise elite group (the samurai) and the prospering peasantry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tokugawa political economy daimyo and shogunThese developments were intrinsic from the political economy of Japan. The system of confederation government introduced at the end of the fifteenth century placed certain barons in the hands of feudalistic warlords, daimyo, and certain violences in the hands of the shogun, the most powerful of the warlords. Each daimyo and the shogun was designate a geographic region, a domain, being given taxation confidence over the peasants residing in the villages of the domain. Intercourse with foreign powers was monopolized by the shogun, thereby preventing daimyo from cementing alliances with new(prenominal)(a) countries in an effort to overthrow the central government. The samurai military retainers of thedaimyo were force to de crock up from rice farming and reside in the castle town central office of their daimyo overlord.In exchange, samurai received rice stipends from the rice taxes collected from the villages of their domain. By removingsamurai from the countryside by demilitarizing rural areas conflicts over local water rights were largely made a thing of the past. As a result irrigation ditches were extend throughout the valleys, and riverbanks were shored up with stone embankments, facilitating transport and preventing flooding. The sustained growth of proto-industrialization in urban Japan, and its general diffusion to villages after 1700 was in addition inseparable from the productivity growth in paddy rice production and the growing of industrial crops like tea, fruit, mulberry plant growing (that sustained the raising of silk cocoons ) and cotton. Indeed, Smith (1988) has given feel of place to these domestic sources of Japans future industrial success. cockiness to emulate the WestAs a result of these domestic advances, Japan was well positioned to take up the Western challenge. It harnessed its infrastructure, its high level of literacy, and its proto-industrial distribution networks to the task of emulating Western organizational forms and Western techniques in heartiness production, first of all and foremost enlisting in natural energy sources like sear and the early(a) fossil fuels to gene invest move power. Having intensively developed the organic economy depending upon natural energy flows like wind, water and fire, Nipponese were sort of prepared to master inorganic production after the Black Ships of the Americans forced Japan to jettison its long-standing autarky.From Balanced to Dualistic product, 1887-1938 Infrastructure and Manufacturing Expand Fukoku KyoheiAfter the Tokugawa government col lapsed in 1868, a new Meiji government commit to the rival policies of fukoku kyohei (wealthy country/strong military) took up the challenge of renegotiating its treaties with the Western powers. It created infrastructure that facilitated industrialization. It construct a modern navy and army that could keep the Western powers at bay and establish a protective buffer zone in North East Asia that eventually formed the basis for a burgeoning Nipponese empire in Asia and the pacific. Central government reforms in education, finance and loony toons Jettisoning the confederation style government of the Tokugawa era, the new leaders of the new Meiji government fashioned a unitary state with powerful ministries consolidating authority in the capital, Tokyo.The freshly minted Ministry of Education promoted compulsory primary schooling for the masses and elite university education aimed at deepening engineering and scientific experience. The Ministry of Finance created the camber of Japan in 1882, laying the foundations for a private banking system approve up a lender of last resort. The government began building a steam railroad trunk line girding the four major is toss offs, support private companies to participate in the project. In particular, the national government committed itself to constructing a Tokaido line connecting the Tokyo/Yokohama region to the Osaka/Kobe conurbation along the Pacific coastline of the main island of Honshu, and to creating deepwater harbors at Yokohama and Kobe that could accommodate deep-hulled steamships. Not surprisingly, the merchants in Osaka, the merchant capital of Tokugawa Japan, already well versed in proto-industrial production, turned to harnessing steam and coal, investment heavily in integrated spinning and weaving steam- targetn textile move during the 1880s.Diffusion of best(p)- exercise cultureAt the same time, the abolition of the three vitamin C or so feudal fiefs that were the backbone of confederation style-Tokugawa rule and their desegregation into politically weak prefectures, downstairs a strong national government that virtually monopolized taxation authority, gave a strong push to the diffusion of best invest coarse technique. The nationwide diffusion of seed varieties developed in the Southwest fiefs of Tokugawa Japan spearheaded a substantial improvement in agricultural productivity especially in the Northeast. Simultaneously, expansion of agriculture employ tralatitious Japanese technology agriculture and manufacturing using imported Western technology resulted.Balanced growth ingathering at the close of the nineteenth century was balanced in the sense that traditional and modern technology using sectors grew at roughly equal rates, and advertise especially young girls recruited out of farm households to beat back in the steam using textile move flowed back and forth between rural and urban Japan at wages that were roughly equal in industrial and agricultural pursuits.geographic economies of shell in the Tokaido brawlConcentration of industrial production first in Osaka and ulteriorly throughout the Tokaido belt fostered powerful geographic plate economies (the ability to reduce per unit costs as output levels increase), cut down the costs of securing energy, raw materials and access to orbiculate markets for enterprises located in the colossal harbor metropolises stretching from the massive Osaka/Kobe complex northward to the teeming Tokyo/Yokohama conurbation. Between 1904 and 1911, electrification mainly due to the proliferation of intercity electrical railroads created economies of home in the dissilient industrial belt facing outward onto the Pacific. The consolidation of two long hydroelectric power grids during the twenties one servicing Tokyo/Yokohama, the other Osaka and Kobe further solidified the comparative advantage of the Tokaido industrial belt in factory production. Finally, the output and paving during the 19 20s of roads that could handle buses and trucks was withal pioneered by the great metropolises of the Tokaido, which further bolstered their relative advantage in per capita infrastructure. organizational economies of scale zaibatsuIn addition to geographic scale economies, organizational scale economies also became increasingly important in the late nineteenth centuries. The constitution of the zaibatsu (financial cliques), which gradually evolved into diversified industrial combines tied together through central holding companies, is a case in point. By the 1910s these had evolved into exceedingly diversified combines, binding together enterprises in banking and insurance, trading companies, mining concerns, textiles, push and steel plants, and machinery manufactures. By channeling profits from older industries into new lines of activity like electrical machinery manufacturing, the zaibatsu form of organization generated scale economies in finance, occupation and manufactur ing, drastically reducing information-gathering and transactions costs. By attracting relatively scare managerial and entrepreneurial talent, the zaibatsu format economized on human resources.ElectrificationThe push into electrical machinery production during the 1920s had a revolutionary impact on manufacturing. Effective exploitation of steam power required the use of large central steam engines at the same time driving a large number of machines power looms and mules in a spinning/weaving plant for instance throughout a factory. pocketable enterprises did not mechanize in the steam era. But with electrification the unit drive system of automation spread. Each machine could be powered up independently of one some other. Mechanization spread rapidly to the smallest factory.Emergence of the Manichaean economyWith the drive into heavy industries chemicals, iron and steel, machinery the beseech for skilled labor that would flexibly respond to rapid changes in technique soare d. Large firms in these industries began offering premium wages and guarantees of employment in good time and bad as a way of motivating and holding onto invaluable workers. A dualistic economy emerged during the 1910s. Small firms, light industry and agriculture offered relatively low wages. Large enterprises in the heavy industries offered much more favorable remuneration, extending paternalistic benefits like company housing and company benefit programs to their internal labor markets. As a result a widening gulf opened up between the great metropolitan centers of the Tokaido and rural Japan. Income per head was far higher in the great industrial centers than in the back country.Clashing urban/rural and landlord/tenant interestsThe frugal strains of emergent dualism were amplified by the slowing down of technological progress in the agricultural sector, which had thoroughly reaped the benefits due to regional diffusion from the Southwest to the Northeast of best practice To kugawa rice cultivation. Landlords around 45% of the cultivable rice paddy land in Japan was held in some form of tenancy at the beginning of the twentieth century who had played a crucial component in promoting the diffusion of traditional best practice techniques now confused interest in rural affairs and turned their attention to industrial activities. dwells also found their interests disregarded by the national authorities in Tokyo, who were increasingly focused on supplying cheap foodstuffs to the burgeoning industrial belt by promoting agricultural production within the empire that it was assembling through military victories. Japan secured Taiwan from China in 1895, and formally brought Korea under its proud rule in 1910 upon the heels of its successful war a make believest Russia in 1904-05. Tenant unions reacted to this callous disrespect of their needs through violence. Landlord/tenant disputes broke out in the early 1920s, and continued to plague Japan politically t hroughout the 1930s, calls for land reform and bureaucratic proposals for reform being rejected by a Diet (Japans legislature) politically dominated by landlords.Japans military expansionJapans thrust to imperial expansion was inflamed by the growing derangement of the geopolitical and internationalistic trade regime of the later 1920s and early 1930s. The relative pooh-pooh of the United Kingdom as an economic power doomed a gold standard regime tied to the British pound. The United States was get a potential contender to the United Kingdom as the angel of a gold standard regime but its long narration of high tariffs and isolationism deterred it from taking over leadership in promoting global trade openness. Germany and the Soviet Union were increasingly becoming industrial and military giants on the Eurasian land mass committed to ideologies hostile to the liberal state championed by the United Kingdom and the United States. It was against this international backdrop that Japan began aggressively staking out its claim to being the dominant military power in East Asia and the Pacific, thereby bringing it into conflict with the United States and the United Kingdom in the Asian and Pacific theaters after the institution slipped into global warfare in 1939.Reform and Re formula in a new International economic Order, Japan after World War II Postwar occupation economic and institutional restructuring Surrendering to the United States and its allies in 1945, Japans economy and infrastructure was revamped under the S.C.A.P (Supreme Commander of the assort Powers) Occupation lasting through 1951. As Nakamura (1995) points out, a form of Occupation-sponsored reforms alter the institutional environment conditioning economic performance in Japan.The major zaibatsu were liquidated by the Holding Company Liquidation Commission set up under the Occupation (they were revamped as keiretsu corporate groups mainly tied together through cross-shareholding of sto ck in the aftermath of the Occupation) land reform wiped out landlordism and gave a strong push to agricultural productivity through mechanization of rice cultivation and collective bargaining, largely illegal under the pause Preservation Act that was used to suppress union organizing during the interwar period, was given the visage of constitutional legality. Finally, education was opened up, partly through making nitty-gritty school compulsory, partly through the creation of national universities in distributively of Japans forty- sixsome prefectures.Improvement in the social capability for economic growthIn short, from a domestic point of view, the social capability for importing and adapting foreign technology was improved with the reforms in education and the fillip to competition given by the dissolution of the zaibatsu. Resolving strain between rural and urban Japan through land reform and the establishment of a rice price support program that guaranteed farmers incomes alike(p) to blue collar industrial workers also contributed to the social capacity to trace foreign technology by suppressing the political divisions between metropolitan and hinterland Japan that plagued the nation during the interwar years.Japan and the postwar international orderThe revamped international economic order contributed to the social capability of importing and adapting foreign technology. The instability of the 1920s and 1930s was replaced with replaced with a relatively predictable bipolar world in which the United States and the Soviet Union opposed each other in both geopolitical and ideological arenas. The United States became an architect of four-lobed architecture designed to encourage trade through its sponsorship of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and peck (the predecessor to the World alternate Organization). Under the logic of building military alliances to contain Eurasian Comm unism, the United States brought Japan under its nuclear comprehensive with a bilateral security treaty. American companies were encouraged to license technology to Japanese companies in the new international environment. Japan redirected its trade by from the areas that had been incorporated into the Japanese Empire before 1945, and towards the huge and expanding American market.Miracle crop Soaring Domestic Investment and Export outgrowth, 1953-1970 Its infrastructure revitalized through the Occupation period reforms, its capacity to import and export enhanced by the new international economic order, and its access to American technology bolstered through its security pact with the United States, Japan experienced the dramatic Miracle result between 1953 and the early 1970s whose sources have been cogently analyzed by Denison and Chung (1976). peculiarly striking in the Miracle Growth period was the remarkable increase in the rate of domestic fixed capital formation, the ris e in the investment proportion being matched by a rising savings rate whose secular increase especially that of private household savings has been well documented and analyzed by Horioka (1991). While Japan continued to close the gap in income per capita between itself and the United States after the early 1970s, most scholars believe that large Japanese manufacturing enterprises had by and large become internationally competitive by the early 1970s. In this sense it can be said that Japan had completed its nine decade long convergence to international competitiveness through industrialization by the early 1970s.MITI in that respect is little doubt that the social capacity to import and adapt foreign technology was vastly improved in the aftermath of the Pacific War. Creating social consensus with Land Reform and agricultural subsidies reduced political divisiveness, extending compulsory education and breaking up the zaibatsu had a positive impact. Fashioning the Ministry of Inte rnational Trade and Industry (M.I.T.I.) that took responsibility for overseeing industrial policy is also viewed as facilitating Japans social capability. There is no doubt that M.I.T.I. drove down the cost of securing foreign technology. By intervening between Japanese firms and foreign companies, it acted as a single buyer of technology, playing off competing American and European enterprises in order to reduce the royalties Japanese concerns had to pay on technology licenses. By keeping domestic patent periods short, M.I.T.I. encouraged rapid diffusion of technology.And in some cases the experience of International Business Machines (I.B.M.), enjoying a virtual monopoly in global mainframe computer markets during the 1950s and early 1960s, is a classical case M.I.T.I. made it a condition of creation into the Japanese market (through the creation of a subsidiary Japan I.B.M. in the case of I.B.M.) that foreign companies share many of their technological secrets with potential J apanese competitors. How important industrial policy was for Miracle Growth remains controversial, however. The view of Johnson (1982), who hails industrial policy as a pillar of the Japanese victimization State (government promoting economic growth through state policies) has been criticized and revised by subsequent scholars. The book by Uriu (1996) is a case in point. Internal labor markets, just-in-time inventory and quality control circles Furthering the internalization of labor markets the premium wages and long-term employment guarantees largely restricted to white collar workers were extended to blue collar workers with the legalization of unions and collective bargaining after 1945 also raised the social capability of adapting foreign technology.Internalizing labor created a exceedingly flexible labor force in post-1950 Japan. As a result, Japanese workers embraced many of the key ideas of Just-in-Time inventory control and Quality Control circles in assembly industries , learning how to do rapid machine setups as part and parcel of an effort to produce components just-in-time and without defect. Ironically, the concepts of just-in-time and quality control were originally developed in the United States, just-in-time methods being pioneered by supermarkets and quality control by efficiency experts like W. Edwards Deming. Yet it was in Japan that these concepts were relentlessly prosecute to revolutionize assembly line industries during the 1950s and 1960s.Ultimate causes of the Japanese economic miracleMiracle Growth was the completion of a protracted historical process involving enhancing human capital, massive accumulation of physical capital including infrastructure and private manufacturing capacity, the signification and adaptation of foreign technology, and the creation of scale economies, which took decades and decades to echtize. Dubbed a miracle, it is best seen as the reaping of a bountiful harvest whose seeds were painstakingly planted in the six decades between 1880 and 1938. In the course of the nine decades between the 1880s and 1970, Japan amassed and lost a sprawling empire, reorienting its trade and geopolitical stance through the twists and turns of history. While the ultimate sources of growth can be ferreted out through some form of statistical calculateing, the specific way these sources were marshaled in practice is inseparable from the history of Japan itself and of the global environment within which it has realized its industrial destiny.Appendix Sources of Growth Accounting and Quantitative Aspects of Japans Modern Economic Development One of the attractions of studying Japans post-1880 economic development is the abundance of quantitative data documenting Japans growth. Estimates of Japanese income and output by sector, capital stock and labor force extend back to the 1880s, a period when Japanese income per capita was low. Consequently statistical probing of Japans long-run growth from relative want to abundance is possible.The remainder of this appendix is devoted to introducing the reader to the vast publications on quantitative analysis of Japans economic development from the 1880s until 1970, a nine decade period during which Japanese income per capita converged towards income per capita levels in Western Europe. As the reader will see, this discussion confirms the grandness of factors discussed at the outset of this article. Our initial touchstone is the excellent sources of growth accounting analysis carried out by Denison and Chung (1976) on Japans growth between 1953 and 1971. Attributing growth in national income in growth of inputs, the factors of production capital and labor and growth in output per unit of the two inputs feature (total factor productivity) along the following lines G(Y) = a G(K) + 1-a G(L) + G (A)where G(Y) is the (annual) growth of national output, g(K) is the growth rate of capital services, G(L) is the growth rate of labor services, a is capitals share in national income (the share of income accruing to owners of capital), and G(A) is the growth of total factor productivity, is a standard approach used to harsh the sources of growth of income. Using a variant of this type of decomposition that takes into account improvements in the quality of capital and labor, estimates of scale economies and adjustments for structural change (shifting labor out of agriculture helps explain why total factor productivity grows), Denison and Chung (1976) generate a useful set of estimates for Japans Miracle Growth era.Operating with this sources of growth approach and proceeding under a variety of plausible assumptions, Denison and Chung (1976) estimate that of Japans average annual real national income growth of 8.77 % over 1953-71, input growth accounted for 3.95% (accounting for 45% of total growth) and growth in output per unit of input contributed 4.82% (accounting for 55% of total growth). To be sure, the precise assumpt ions and techniques they use can be criticized. The precise quantitative results they arrive at can be argued over. Still, their general point that Japans growth was the result of improvements in the quality of factor inputs wellness and education for workers, for instance and improvements in the way these inputs are utilized in production due to technological and organizational change, reallocation of resources from agriculture to non-agriculture, and scale economies, is defensible.Notes a Maddison (2000) provides estimates of real income that take into account the purchasing power of national currencies. b Ohkawa (1979) gives estimates for the N sector that is defined as manufacturing and mining (Ma) summing up construction plus facilitating industry (transport, communications and utilities). It should be noted that the concept of an N sector is not standard in the field of economics. c The estimates of trade are obtained by adding merchandise imports to merchandise exports. Trade openness is estimated by taking the ratio of total (merchandise) trade to national output, the latter defined as tax income Domestic Product (G.D.P.).The trade figures include trade with Japans empire (Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, etc.) the income figures for Japan exclude income generated in the empire. d The Human Development power is a composite variable formed by adding together indices for educational attainment, for health (using life expectancy that is inversely related to the level of the child mortality rate, the IMR), and for real per capita income. For a detailed discussion of this index see United Nations Development Programme (2000). e Electrical generation is measured in million kilowatts generated and supplied. For 1970, the figures on NHK subscribers are for television subscribers. The symbol n.a. = not available. Sources The figures in this table are taken from various pages and tables in Japan statistical Association (1987), Maddison (2000), Minami (1994), a nd Ohkawa (1979).Flowing from this table are a number of points that weather lessons of the Denison and Chung (1976) decomposition. One cluster of points bears upon the timing of Japans income per capita growth and the relationship of manufacturing expansion to income growth. Another highlights improvements in the quality of the labor input. Yet another points to the overriding importance of domestic investment in manufacturing and the lesser consequence of trade demand. A fourth group suggests that infrastructure has been important to economic growth and industrial expansion in Japan, as exemplified by the figures on electricity generating capacity and the mass diffusion of communications in the form of radio and television broadcasting. Several parts of Table 1 point to industrialization, defined as an increase in the proportion of output (and labor force) attributable to manufacturing and mining, as the driving force in explaining Japans income per capita growth. Notable in or naments A and B of the table is that the gap between Japanese and American income per capita closed most decisively during the 1910s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, precisely the periods when manufacturing expansion was the most vigorous.Equally noteworthy of the spurts of the 1910s, 1930s and the 1960s is the overriding importance of gross domestic fixed capital formation, that is investment, for growth in demand. By contrast, trade seems much less important to growth in demand during these critical decades, a point emphasized by both Minami (1994) and by Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973). The notion that Japanese growth was export led during the nine decades between 1880 and 1970 when Japan caught up technologically with the leading Western nations is not defensible. Rather, domestic capital investment seems to be the driving force behind heart demand expansion. The periods of especially intense capital formation were also the periods when manufacturing production soared. Capital formation i n manufacturing, or in infrastructure load-bearing(a) manufacturing expansion, is the main agent pushing long-run income per capita growth.Why? As Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973) argue, spurts in manufacturing capital formation were associated with the import and adaptation of foreign technology, especially from the United States These investment spurts were also associated with shifts of labor force out of agriculture and into manufacturing, construction and facilitating sectors where labor productivity was far higher than it was in labor-intensive farming centered around labor-intensive rice cultivation. The logic of productivity gain due to more efficient allocation of labor resources is apparent from the right hand column of Panel A in Table 1. Finally, Panel C of Table 1 suggests that infrastructure investment that facilitated health and educational attainment (combined public and private expenditure on sanitation, schools and research laboratories), and public/private investment i n physical infrastructure including dams and hydroelectric power grids helped fuel the expansion of manufacturing by improving human capital and by reducing the costs of transportation, communications and energy supply faced by private factories.Mosk (2001) argues that investments in human-capital-enhancing (medicine, public health and education), financial (banking) and physical infrastructure (harbors, roads, power grids, railroads and communications) laid the groundwork for industrial expansions. Indeed, the social capability for importing and adapting foreign technology emphasized by Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973) can be largely explained by an infrastructure-driven growth hypothesis like that given by Mosk (2001). In sum, Denison and Chung (1976) argue that a combination of input factor improvement and growth in output per combined factor inputs account for Japans most rapid spurt of economic growth. Table 1 suggests that labor quality improved because health was enhanced and educa tional attainment increased that investment in manufacturing was important not only because it increased capital stock itself but also because it reduced dependence on agriculture and went hand in glove with improvements in knowledge and that the social capacity to absorb and adapt Western technology that fueled improvements in knowledge was associated with infrastructure investment.ReferencesDenison, Edward and William Chung. Economic Growth and Its Sources. In Asias Next teras How the Japanese Economy Works, change by Hugh Patrick and Henry Rosovsky, 63-151. Washington, DC Brookings Institution, 1976. Horioka, Charles Y. futurity Trends in Japans Savings Rate and the Implications Thereof for Japans External Imbalance.Japan and the World Economy 3 (1991) 307-330. Japan Statistical Association. historic Statistics of Japan Five Volumes. Tokyo Japan Statistical Association, 1987. Johnson, Chalmers. MITI and the Japanese Miracle The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975. Stanford Stanford University Press, 1982. Maddison, Angus. Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992. Paris Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2000. Minami, Ryoshin. Economic Development of Japan A Quantitative Study. Second edition. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire Macmillan Press, 1994. Mitchell, Brian. International Historical Statistics Africa and Asia. raw York New York University Press, 1982. Mosk, Carl. Japanese Industrial History Technology, Urbanization, and Economic Growth. Armonk, New York M.E. Sharpe, 2001. Nakamura, Takafusa. The Postwar Japanese Economy Its Development and Structure, 1937-1994. Tokyo University of Tokyo Press, 1995. Ohkawa, Kazushi. occupation Structure. In Patterns of Japanese Economic Development A Quantitative Appraisal, edited by Kazushi Ohkawa and Miyohei Shinohara with Larry Meissner, 34-58. New Haven Yale UniversityPress, 1979. Ohkawa, Kazushi and Henry Rosovsky. Japanese Economic Growth Trend Acceleration in the Twentieth Century. Stanford, CA Stanford University Press, 1973. Smith, Thomas. Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920. Berkeley University of California Press, 1988. Uriu, Robert. Troubled Industries Confronting Economic Challenge in Japan. Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1996. United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report, 2000. New York Oxford University Press, 2000. Citation Mosk, Carl. Japan, Industrialization and Economic Growth. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. January 18, 2004. URL http//eh.net/encyclopedia/article/mosk.japan.final