This paper studies technology absorption worldwide in the late nineteenth century. We construct several novel datasets to test the idea that the codification of technical knowledge in the vernacular was necessary for countries to absorb the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. We find that comparative advantage shifted to industries that could benefit from patents only in countries and colonies that had access to codified technical knowledge but not in other regions. Using the rapid and unprecedented codification of technical knowledge in Meiji Japan as a natural experiment, we show that this pattern appeared in Japan only after the Japanese government codified as much technical knowledge as what was available in Germany in 1870. Our findings shed new light on the frictions associated with technology diffusion and offer a novel take on why Meiji Japan was unique among non-Western countries in successfully industrializing during the first wave of globalization.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We give special thanks to Chris Meissner and John Tang for sharing their trade data for Belgium and Japan. We thank Benjamin Eyal, Isaac Loomis, Zachary Marcone, Ojaswee Rajbhandari, Roshan Setlur, Alex Zhang, and especially Michael Duarte, Verónica C. Pérez, Angela Wu, and Dongcheng Yang for excellent research assistance. We also want to thank Treb Allen, Andrew Bernard, Kirill Borusyak, Florian Caro, Davin Chor, John Fernald, Shizuka Inoue, Takatoshi Ito, Chiaki Moriguchi, Robert Staiger, Jón Steinsson, and Dan Trefler for their excellent comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w32667
- Pages
- 66
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES 1
- CODIFICATION TECHNOLOGY ABSORPTION AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 1
- Réka Juhász Shogo Sakabe David Weinstein 1
- Working Paper 32667 httpwww.nber.orgpapersw32667 1
- NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge MA 02138 July 2024 1
- Codification Technology Absorption and the Globalization of the Industrial Revolution Réka Juhász Shogo Sakabe and David Weinstein NBER Working Paper No. 32667 July 2024 JEL No. F14F63N15 2
- Réka Juhász Vancouver School of Economics University of British Colunbia 6000 Iona Drive Vancouver BC V6T 1L4 and NBER reka.juhaszubc.ca 2
- Shogo Sakabe ss5122columbia.edu 2
- David Weinstein Columbia University Department of Economics 420 W. 118th Street MC 3308 New York NY 10027 and NBER dew35columbia.edu 2
- 1 Introduction 3
- 2 Historical Context 7
- 2.1 Meiji Technology Policy 8
- 2.2 Education Policies 10
- 2.3 Paying For The Technology Transfer Policies 11
- 3 Data 12
- 3.1 Constructing the British Patent Relevance measure 12
- 3.1.1 Industrial manuals as repositories of codified technical knowledge 13
- 3.1.2 Quantifying the supply of technical knowledge by industry 13
- 3.2 Measuring the codification of knowledge around the world 17
- 3.3 Cross-region bilateral industry level trade flows 18
- 4 Stylized Facts 19
- 4.1 Books in most languages contained little codified knowledge 19
- 4.2 The Japanese language had uniquely high growth rates of codified knowledge 20
- 4.3 Per capita income falls with linguistic distance from languages that codified knowledge 22
- 4.4 Japanese manufacturing grew rapidly after codifying knowledge 24
- 5 Estimating Productivity Growth 26
- 5.1 Estimating Productivity Growth 27
- 6 The Meiji Miracle in Comparative Perspective 29
- 7 Codification and Development 31
- 8 Conclusion 37
- References 39
- Online Appendix 42
- A Additional Tables 42
- B Additional Figures 48
- C Constructing Annual Growth Rates 52
- D Variables from External Sources 53
- D.1 Ethnologue 2023 Plurarity Language by Country 53
- D.2 Federico et al. 2011 Historical Italian Trade 53
- D.3 Foreign Service Institute 2023 Weeks to Learn a Language 53
- D.4 High-Income Countries 53
- D.5 Chanut 2000 French Energy Data 54
- D.6 Fouquin and Hugot 2016 Historical Exchange Rates 54
- Yen Exchange Rates 54
- D.7 Mayer and Zignago 2011 GeoDist Database 2011 - Distance to U.K. 55
- Distance from United Kingdom 55
- D.8 Huberman et al. 2017 - Historical Belgian Trade 55
- D.9 Long Term Economic Statistics of Japan - Historical Nominal Pro- duction of Japan 56
- Real and Nominal Production of Japan 1874-1910 56
- D.10 Maddison Project Database - Historical GDP and Population by Country 56
- High- Medium- and Low-Income 56
- Annualized Population Growth 56
- D.11 Meissner and Tang 2018 - Historical Japanese Trade 57
- E Bilateral Trade Dataset 57
- E.1 Harmonization of Product Lines 58
- E.2 Harmonization of Countries 58
- E.3 Harmonization of Currencies 60
- E.3.1 Double Reporting 60
- F British Patent Relevance in the Late 1800s 61
- F.1 Intuition 61
- F.2 Building the Terms 61
- F.3 Focusing on Jargon 62
- F.4 Formally Defining TF-IDF 62
- F.4.1 Cosine Similarities 63
- F.5 Data Sources 63
- G New Japanese Words in the Meiji Period 63
- H Technical Books in the Top World Languages 1800-1910 63
- H.1 Overview 63
- H.2 Issues with WorldCat 65
- H.3 Search Filters 65
- H.4 Handling Duplicated Books 65
