Jean-Pascal Bassino

Jean-Pascal Bassino
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon | ENS Lyon · UMR 5062 - Institut d'Asie Orientale (IAO)

PhD

About

69
Publications
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Introduction
Jean-Pascal Bassino is professor of economics at ENS Lyon (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France). He is currently on a research leave as CNRS fellow at the French Research Institute of Research on Japan at Maison Franco-Japonaise (Nichi Futsu Kaikan, Tokyo) and visiting researcher at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo). Jean-Pascal does research in Economic History, Development Economics, and Environmental Economics on Japan, Southeast Asia, and Southern Europe.

Publications

Publications (69)
Article
This paper contributes to quantifying the biological implications of short-run climatic shocks and economic fluctuations in developing countries. Relying on a unique economic, climatic and anthropometric Japanese data covering the period from 1872 to 1917 (corresponding to the early phase of Japanese industrialization), we estimate the impact of ye...
Chapter
The first volume of The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World traces the emergence of modern economic growth in eighteenth century Britain and its spread across the globe. Focusing on the period from 1700 to 1870, a team of leading experts in economic history offer a series of regional studies from around the world, as well as thematic ana...
Article
Full-text available
ARCHIPELAGO is an archaeological and historical database of land and sea food resources utilised in the Japanese Islands. Here we present a dataset of human bone and hair carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes measurements from Japanese archaeological sites covering the time span from the Upper Palaeolithic to the mid-nineteenth century. Reflecting th...
Preprint
Full-text available
A regional divide appeared during the process of industrialization in most European countries and in the US. Not in Japan where there was no equivalent of the Mezzogiorno of Italy or the Deep South of the United States. Initial conditions in early 19th century Japan were characterized, as in European countries, by the presence of manufacturing acti...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper presents evidence of the irreversible consequences of exogenous climatic shocks and economic fluctuations on human welfare. We rely on a unique data set covering the period from 1872 to 1917, corresponding to the early phase of Japanese industrialization. This data includes prefecture level average temperature, precipitation, agricultura...
Article
This article uses expenditure‐based purchasing power parities (PPPs) to estimate GDP per capita in comparable prices for 12 Asian countries for six benchmark years during the period 1913–69. The article finds that in 1913 levels of real GDP per capita in several countries were comparable to those in Japan. GDP per capita in Japan and other Asian co...
Article
Despite being the first Asian economy to achieve modern economic growth, Japan has received relatively little attention in the Great Divergence debate. New estimates suggest that although the level of GDP per capita remained below the level of northwest Europe throughout the period 730–1874, Japan experienced positive trend growth before 1868, in c...
Conference Paper
Network analysis techniques remain rarely used for understanding international management strategies.
Article
Despite the large literature on the link between climate evolution and country economic performance, the specific question of the effects of climatic changes via the agricultural sector broken down by annual seasons in the Euro- Mediterranean region, which is considered as a hotspot of climate change, remains largely understudied. This paper invest...
Article
Full-text available
Network analysis techniques remain rarely used for understanding international management strategies. Our paper highlights their value as research tool in this field of social science using a large set of micro-data (20,000) to investigate the presence of networks of subsidiaries overseas. The research question is the following: to what extent did/...
Chapter
Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, industrialization has been the key to modern economic growth. The fact that modern industry originated in Britain, and spread initially to northwestern Europe and North America, implied a dramatic divergence in living standards between the industrial North (...
Article
Full-text available
This paper investigates the biological standard of living in the Philippines toward the end of Spanish rule. We investigate levels, trends, and determinants of physical stature from the birth cohorts of the 1860s to the 1890s using data on 23,000 Filipino soldiers enlisted by the US military between 1901 and 1913. We estimate average heights and us...
Working Paper
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Does the shift from subsistence agriculture to a specialization in cash-crop production affect human capital? We assess the influence of the rapid expansion of the cultivation of cash crops for export in the mid and late 19th century Philippines, with a focus on the increase or decline of basic numeracy. Based on the historiography, we expect the e...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate the impact of host-country risk on the expatriation strategies of multinational firms, using data on Japanese subsidiary firms in manufacturing industries in 13 host countries in Asia. We find that country risk is negatively correlated with the degree of expatriation and that, rather than host-country risk, firm-specific factors (par...
Article
Full-text available
This article relies on a unique dataset of daily price indices for stocks and bonds to analyse the functioning of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in the period 1931–40. We find that this market deviated from weak-form efficiency, in a context of cross-market segmentation, short-run spillovers, and turmoil surrounding major events. In this context, z...
Book
Full-text available
Outline This book is organized into two parts with a total of seven chapters (including the present chapter) and four appendixes. Part I covers both the prewar and the postwar period, while Part II provides a more detailed analysis focusing on the postwar period. The three chapters of Part I first examine inequality and convergence (Chapter 2), the...
Article
This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of buildi...
Article
Wheat production stagnated in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while cultivated acreage and wheat output declined sharply around the Mediterranean from the 1870s. Wheat output never recovered in this region despite the introduction in 1885 of tariff measures, such as the 1892 Méline Tariff. This paper analyses the resp...
Article
Current discussions of climate change are overly focused on the science underpinning environmental impact, with little attention to socioeconomic consequences. The economics of environmental change in particular is insufficiently informed by the lessons that past experiences can yield. Drawing on case studies from Europe and Asia, this special issu...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Abstract Studies comparing regional income in Japan before and after World War II have frequently drawn a picture of radical change from an economy characterized by large regional disparities to one characterized by small regional disparities. This paper comes to a very different conclusion. Based on estimates of prefecture-level value added for fi...
Article
Full-text available
An almost complete halt in the secular trend in stature at a relatively low level is observed in Japan since the late 1980s with average height of around 171 cm for males and 158 cm for females at age 18. Unidentified characteristics in the Japanese genetic pool or in the nutritional intake do not provide a convincing explanation. Japan is unique a...
Article
Full-text available
Scrutinizing the French conscription reports by department reveals that in a great many cases the distribution of draftees’height was abnormal to the point of affecting the meaning of results as indicators of “biological living standards” used in anthropometric research. The present article traces the sometimes-absurd distribution to the proportion...
Article
Full-text available
Studies comparing regional income in Japan before and after World War II have frequently drawn a picture of radical change from an economy characterized by large regional disparities to one characterized by small regional disparities. This paper comes to a very different conclusion. Based on estimates of prefecture-level value added for five benchm...
Article
Did economic development result in an improvement in biological welfare in the tropics before the diffusion of modern public health techniques in the 1950s and 1960s? Between the mid-19th and early 20th century, Lower Burma experienced a rapid rise in population and became increasingly commercialized as a major rice exporter. Land reclamation on a...
Article
This book looks at the new configuration taken by Asia-Europe economic relations. It is set against the background of the inclusion of China in the WTO, the growth of foreign investors from emerging Asian countries, and the economic reforms in a number of crisis-hit South East Asian economies. It is written by a number of well established European...
Article
While enjoying a long period of peace under the rule of the Tokugawa (1603-1867), associated with regional specialization and a relatively high degree of market integration, the Japanese population experienced severe famines that claimed several hundred thousands lives. The most dramatic episodes of the 18 th and 19 th century occurred in 1731-1733...
Article
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* This paper is part of the NSF grant funded project "Global Prices and Income 1350-1950" headed by Peter Lindert and the Spinoza-premium project on Global Economic History funded by NWO (The Netherlands). We want to thank Peter Lindert for suggestions and encouragements at every stage of this paper. We also want to thank Kishimoto Mio and Lillian...
Article
This paper investigates the relationship between physical stature, per capita income, health, and regional inequality in Japan at the prefecture-level for the period 1892-1941. The analysis shows that inequality in income and access to health services explains differences in average height of the population across the 47 Japanese prefectures during...
Article
Constructing consumption baskets for the benchmark periods 1745–1754 and 1882–1886, and price indices, we calculate real wages for Japanese unskilled daily laborers in 1741–1913. Matching caloric content and protein contents in our Japanese consumption baskets with those for Europe, we compare Japanese and European urban real wages. Real wages in K...
Article
It is generally accepted that agriculture played a crucial role in Japanese economic development during the Meiji period (1868-1912). According to the Long-Term Economic Statistics of Japan estimates, per capita food consumption grew by 1.1% annually in constant yen between 1874 and 1912. Food-supply data converted into caloric intake indicate a gr...
Article
Full-text available
The conventional interpretation of Asia's agricultural transformation during the 20th century is that land productivity and land/labor ratios, which were both initially comparatively low, increased as a result of technological change. Data available for a number of Asian countries have usually been interpreted as showing as a land-replacing path de...
Article
The conventional interpretation of Asia’s agricultural transformation during the 20th century is that land productivity and land/labor ratios, which were both initially comparatively low, increased as a result of technological change. As pointed by Van der Eng (2004), output, acreage, and labor input in rice cultivation available for a number of As...
Article
Did Japanese Living Standards Improved during the Meiji Economic Miracle? This paper proposes a review of evidence based on various data available for analyzing changes in living standards in Japan between the early 19th and the early 20th century. The first part compares per capita income estimates for Japan and other Asian countries and examines...
Article
In Japan, as in other countries of the world, structural change in recent decades has manifested itself by a significant increase in the share of services in total output. Using input–output tables for Japan, and by de-composing the growth rate over the years 1975–1995, we find that the level of final demand contributed more to output change during...
Article
Full-text available
Le projet Asian Historical Statistics (ASHSTAT), désigné en japonais comme projet Ajia Chôki Keizai Tokei , a été lancé en 1995 comme programme Centre of Excellence financé par le Ministère de l'Éducation du Japon (Monbushô n° 07CE1001, dont le responsable scientifique est Odaka Konosuke) . L'objectif du projet ASHSTAT a été d'analyser la transform...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
An extraordinary process of economic divergence took place in Asia during the 20th century. There seems to be consensus among economic historians that the levels of economic development and the living standards in Asian countries were relatively similar before World War I, albeit that Japan was ahead of the rest. Since then, the gap between Japan a...
Article
Although the reasons why firms choose to invest in the world's different geographical regions are by now well documented, what is less known is the nature and extent of the interdependency of trade between, on the one hand, subsidiaries of firms located in the same geographical region and, on the other, trade between these subsidiaries and those lo...
Chapter
The 1997-8 Asian financial crisis indicates the growing interdependence existing between EU and Asian economies. Excessive reliance upon international capital flows is currently seen as one of the main explanatory factors of this turmoil, combined with an inappropriate allocation of domestic resources and the many distortions induced by market-unfr...
Chapter
The dynamics and spatial distribution of Japanese investment in China have several specific patterns. In spite of this country being the main economic power in the area, Japan’s direct foreign investment (DFI) flows represent a relatively small share of the total. Although it may be necessary to re-evaluate the amount of Japanese FDI, this state of...
Chapter
The economic integration of East Asia appears, at first glance, to be a new tendency related to the emergence of the Asia-Pacific region during the 1980s as the new centre of the world economy. We could, however, consider this integration as a long-term trend which was thwarted over some thirty years (from around 1945 to 1975) partly by exogenous s...
Article
Full-text available
Although the French franc, a gold standard currency before 1914, and between 1929 and 1936, was the sole legal tender within the framework of the French colonial Empire, Vietnam was an exception. This country, along with the other territories which were part of French Indochina, had a separate national currency, the piastre, established in 1878, wh...
Article
Full-text available
How poor was Asia before World War II? The common perception is that living standards in Japan were lower than in Western Europe and even lower in other Asian countries. This study offers a comparison of nominal wages and welfare ratios for 1880-1938. It is based on price and wage data for six East Asian cities (Bangkok, Hanoi, Penang, Saigon, Sing...
Article
"May 1998" -- Title page Asian Historical Statistics Project (AHSTAT-COE Project), Vietnam 1895-1954 Research Group (VN98-1) An earlier and shorter version of this discussion paper was published in the Newsletter of the Asian Historical Statistics Project (October 1997). This paper proposes a survey of sources and works on Vietnam's historical stat...
Article
Full-text available
"May 1998" -- Title page Asian Historical Statistics Project (AHSTAT-COE Project), Vietnam 1895-1954 Research Group (VN98-2) This paper presents preliminary findings on population and labour force in Vietnam under French rule, between 1900 and 1954. These data are based on estimations and censuses carried out by the colonial administration. For the...
Article
Studies comparing regional income in Japan before and after World War II have frequently drawn a picture of radical change from an economy characterized by large regional disparities to one characterized by small regional disparities. This paper comes to a very different conclusion. Based on estimates of prefecture-level value added for five benchm...

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