Comments on The Economic System in Late Dynastic Chosun: Characteristics of the WideArea Economic In

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Comments on The Economic System in Late
Dynastic Chosun Characteristics of the Wide-Area
Economic Integration (Park Ti Taek and Rhee
Young Hoon)

• Cameron Campbell (UCLA)

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Key points

• Overlapping economies
• Customary economy
• Peasants distribution
• Periodic markets
• Command economy
• Public finance distribution
• Redistribution
• Market economy
• Long-distance
• Merchants
• Conclusion Command economy primary

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Evidence against a merchant economy

• Low urbanization limited opportunities for
  merchants
• Economy was not monetized
• Silver was not widely used except for trade with
  China
• Coins were difficult to transport over long
  distances
• Taxation was predominantly in kind, not in cash
• Collection of coins for tax kept peasants happy
  by giving them an option when they were short of
  rice or cotton
• High rates of state grain storage

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Grain storage

• Lots of it!
• Per capita storage 5 times as much in Chosun as
  in China
• Per capita carryover twice as much
• Why?
• Good harvests
• Loaning
• Moral economy

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Periodic markets

• How was the prevalence of periodic markets
  associated with characteristics of the
  prefecture?
• Stored grain
• Households
• Military men
• Taxable land
• Correlations between these in Table 3 are
  extremely strong

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Periodic markets

• Holding number of households constant, more
  frequent in wealthier areas
• Military men per household, kyuls per household
  (Table 4)
• Other aggregate characteristics appear
  unimportant
• Ship ownership, paddies, cotton cloth paying
• Regression (Table 5) confirms population and
  taxable land are primary determinants of
  frequency of markets

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Grain storage

• Regional characteristics
• Numbers of military men
• Regional characteristics
• Very different pattern of effects from that
  observed for periodic markets

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Specifics

• Monetization
• Were coins really restricted to local trade?
• Coins moved over long distances in China
• Land transportation may have been prohibitive,
  but what about coastal shipping?
• What about settlement devices used by merchants
  elsewhere to avoid transportation costs?
• Letters of credit, networks of kin, etc.
• Claims about monetization, or lack of it, rely
  heavily on deduction
• Perhaps empirical basis is well-known to Korea
  specialists, but not obvious to non-specialists

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Grain storage

• Was all of the grain referred to in the analysis
  part of the redistributive system?
• China had distinct civilian and military
  procurement systems
• Correlation between military men raises the
  possibility that analyzed data refers to all
  grain, not just civilian grain
• Does the papers description of grain storage
  refer primarily to the 18th century?
• Kim paper indicates that the system deteriorated
  in the 19th century

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Grain storage

• Is it possible figures exaggerate amount
  available by neglecting storage?
• To what extent was loaning a way of unloading
  stale or otherwise bad grain on the populace, and
  replacing it with fresh grain?
• Why would anyone borrow grain when there were
  good harvests?
• Is it possible to put the 10 rate in context?

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Grain storage

• How did it work?
• How were decisions about purchases or releases
  made?
• China had a reporting system for local food
  prices
• Were purchases compulsory or voluntary?
• How important were interregional movements?
• The text focuses on intertemporal movements, i.e.
  storage
• The appendix refers to interregional movements

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Grain storage

• Assessing its effectiveness
• Larger capacity should have helped dampen annual
  price fluctuations
• How do year to year fluctuations in prices
  compare with those in China and elsewhere?
• Tests
• Are year to year variation in grain prices lower
  in Choson Korea than elsewhere?
• Is annual variation in taxable lands (used as a
  measure of harvest) only weakly correlated with
  prices?
• Is annual variation in taxable lands only weakly
  correlated with demographic rates?
• If interregional movements were important, prices
  should have been correlated across large areas.

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Grain storage

• Characterization of Chinese system on p. 10 and
  11 perhaps needs amendment
• A price reporting system allowed the bureaucracy
  to identify emerging problems in small areas and
  act accordingly.
• The transportation system was developed enough
  that interprovincial movements of grain could be
  carried out
• See Will, Wong, and Lees Nourish the People
• Entire chapter on Shandong province

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General

• Context
• How does this fit into existing debates and
  controversies in Korean economic history?
• How does the assessment differ from the
  previously prevalent views?
• To what extent are the sources and methods here
  novel?

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General

• The political economy of Chosun Korean appears to
  resemble early and middle imperial China than
  late imperial China.
• More explicitly Confucian
• The Qing Chinese state was also heavily involved
  in redistribution, but its approach coexisted
  with and took advantage of private markets
• See Will, Wong and Lee Nourish the People

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General

• Data
• A great deal of economic data appear to be
  available.
• Cross-sectional economic data on regions, at
  least at specific points in time
• Price series
• Real wage series
• Population estimates
• Taxable land time series
• Is it possible to make use of more of these data
  to address the issues in this paper?
• What other data are available?
• Why didnt the grain storage system, or the
  bureaucracy, generate more time series data, as
  it did in China?

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General

• Population
• What are the prospects for linking these economic
  data to demographic data from Korean household
  registers?
• Measurement of implications of economic
  organization for population outcomes?
• If the goal of the moral economy was to ensure
  stability and wellbeing, success or failure may
  be apparent in demographic outcomes but not
  classic economic measures of living standards.

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General

• What are the prospects for replicating in Korea
  analyses from Life Under Pressure?
• Price and household register data
• Associations between grain prices and demographic
  outcomes
• Death rates in Asia (Liaoning and Fukushima) were
  less sensitive to prices than in Europe (Sart,
  Scania, northern Italy)
• We attributed this difference to differing
  orientations of East Asian and European states
• Our analysis of Liaoning made use of household
  registers similar in format and content to
  historical Korean registers

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