Lennart Schön, Lund University

This article presents an overview of Swedish economic growth performance internationally and statistically and an account of major trends in Swedish economic development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹

Modern economic growth in Sweden took off in the middle of the nineteenth century and in international comparative terms Sweden has been rather successful during the past 150 years. This is largely thanks to the transformation of the economy and society from agrarian to industrial. Sweden is a small economy that has been open to foreign influences and highly dependent upon the world economy. Thus, successive structural changes have put their imprint upon modern economic growth.

Swedish Growth in International Perspective

The century-long period from the 1870s to the 1970s comprises the most successful part of Swedish industrialization and growth. On a per capita basis the Japanese economy performed equally well (see Table 1). The neighboring Scandinavian countries also grew rapidly but at a somewhat slower rate than Sweden. Growth in the rest of industrial Europe and in the U.S. was clearly outpaced. Growth in the entire world economy, as measured by Maddison, was even slower.

Table 1 Annual Economic Growth Rates per Capita in Industrial Nations and the World Economy, 1871-2005

Note: Rest of Nordic countries = Denmark, Finland and Norway. Rest of Western Europe = Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Source: Maddison (2006); Krantz/Schön (forthcoming 2007); World Bank, World Development Indicator 2000; Groningen Growth and Development Centre, www.ggdc.com.

The Swedish advance in a global perspective is illustrated in Figure 1. In the mid-nineteenth century the Swedish average income level was close to the average global level (as measured by Maddison). In a European perspective Sweden was a rather poor country. By the 1970s, however, the Swedish income level was more than three times higher than the global average and among the highest in Europe.

Figure 1
Swedish GDP per Capita in Relation to World GDP per Capita, 1870-2004
(Nine year moving averages)

Sources: Maddison (2006); Krantz/Schön (forthcoming 2007).

Note. The annual variation in world production between Maddison’s benchmarks 1870, 1913 and 1950 is estimated from his supply of annual country series.

To some extent this was a catch-up story. Sweden was able to take advantage of technological and organizational advances made in Western Europe and North America. Furthermore, Scandinavian countries with resource bases such as Sweden and Finland had been rather disadvantaged as long as agriculture was the main source of income. The shift to industry expanded the resource base and industrial development – directed both to a growing domestic market but even more to a widening world market – became the main lever of growth from the late nineteenth century.

Catch-up is not the whole story, though. In many industrial areas Swedish companies took a position at the technological frontier from an early point in time. Thus, in certain sectors there was also forging ahead,² quickening the pace of structural change in the industrializing economy. Furthermore, during a century of fairly rapid growth new conditions have arisen that have required profound adaptation and a renewal of entrepreneurial activity as well as of economic policies.

The slow down in Swedish growth from the 1970s may be considered in this perspective. While in most other countries growth from the 1970s fell only in relation to growth rates in the golden post-war ages, Swedish growth fell clearly below the historical long run growth trend. It also fell to a very low level internationally. The 1970s certainly meant the end to a number of successful growth trajectories in the industrial society. At the same time new growth forces appeared with the electronic revolution, as well as with the advance of a more service based economy. It may be the case that this structural change hit the Swedish economy harder than most other economies, at least of the industrial capitalist economies. Sweden was forced into a transformation of its industrial economy and of its political economy in the 1970s and the 1980s that was more profound than in most other Western economies.

A Statistical Overview, 1800-2000

Swedish economic development since 1800 may be divided into six periods with different growth trends, as well as different composition of growth forces.

Table 2 Annual Growth Rates in per Capita Production, Total Investments, Foreign Trade and Population in Sweden, 1800-2000

Source: Krantz/Schön (forthcoming 2007).

In the first decades of the nineteenth century the agricultural sector dominated and growth was slow in all aspects but in population. Still there was per capita growth, but to some extent this was a recovery from the low levels during the Napoleonic Wars. The acceleration during the next period around the mid-nineteenth century is marked in all aspects. Investments and foreign trade became very dynamic ingredients with the onset of industrialization. They were to remain so during the following periods as well. Up to the 1970s per capita growth rates increased for each successive period. In an international perspective it is most notable that per capita growth rates increased also in the interwar period, despite the slow down in foreign trade. The interwar period is crucial for the long run relative success of Swedish economic growth. The decisive culmination in the post-war period with high growth rates in investments and in foreign trade stands out as well, as the deceleration in all aspects in the late twentieth century.

An analysis in a traditional growth accounting framework gives a long term pattern with certain periodic similarities (see Table 3). Thus, total factor productivity growth has increased over time up to the 1970s, only to decrease to its long run level in the last decades. This deceleration in productivity growth may be looked upon either as a failure of the “Swedish Model” to accommodate new growth forces or as another case of the “productivity paradox” in lieu of the information technology revolution.³

Table 3 Total Factor Productivity (TFP) Growth and Relative Contribution of Capital, Labor and TFP to GDP Growth in Sweden, 1840-2000

Source: See Table 2.

In terms of contribution to overall growth, TFP has increased its share for every period. The TFP share was low in the 1840s but there was a very marked increase with the onset of modern industrialization from the 1870s. In relative terms TFP reached its highest level so far from the 1970s, thus indicating an increasing role of human capital, technology and knowledge in economic growth. The role of capital accumulation was markedly more pronounced in early industrialization with the build-up of a modern infrastructure and with urbanization, but still capital did retain much of its importance during the twentieth century. Thus its contribution to growth during the post-war Golden Ages was significant with very high levels of material investments. At the same time TFP growth culminated with positive structural shifts, as well as increased knowledge intensity complementary to the investments. Labor has in quantitative terms progressively reduced its role in economic growth. One should observe, however, the relatively large importance of labor in Swedish economic growth during the interwar period. This was largely due to demographic factors and to the employment situation that will be further commented upon.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, growth was still led by the primary production of agriculture, accompanied by services and transport. Secondary production in manufacturing and building was, on the contrary, very stagnant. From the 1840s the industrial sector accelerated, increasingly supported by transport and communications, as well as by private services. The sectoral shift from agriculture to industry became more pronounced at the turn of the twentieth century when industry and transportation boomed, while agricultural growth decelerated into subsequent stagnation. In the post-war period the volume of services, both private and public, increased strongly, although still not outpacing industry. From the 1970s the focus shifted to private services and to transport and communications, indicating fundamental new prerequisites of growth.

Table 4 Growth Rates of Industrial Sectors, 1800-2000

Source: See Table 2.

Note: Private services are exclusive of dwelling services.

Growth and Transformation in the Agricultural Society of the Early Nineteenth Century

During the first half of the nineteenth century the agricultural sector and the rural society dominated the Swedish economy. Thus, more than three-quarters of the population were occupied in agriculture while roughly 90 percent lived in the countryside. Many non-agrarian activities such as the iron industry, the saw mill industry and many crafts as well as domestic, religious and military services were performed in rural areas. Although growth was slow, a number of structural and institutional changes occurred that paved the way for future modernization.

Most important was the transformation of agriculture. From the late eighteenth century commercialization of the primary sector intensified. Particularly during the Napoleonic Wars, the domestic market for food stuffs widened. The population increase in combination with the temporary decrease in imports stimulated enclosures and reclamation of land, the introduction of new crops and new methods and above all it stimulated a greater degree of market orientation. In the decades after the war the traditional Swedish trade deficit in grain even shifted to a trade surplus with an increasing exportation of oats, primarily to Britain.

Concomitant with the agricultural transformation were a number of infrastructural and institutional changes. Domestic transportation costs were reduced through investments in canals and roads. Trade of agricultural goods was liberalized, reducing transaction costs and integrating the domestic market even further. Trading companies became more effective in attracting agricultural surpluses for more distant markets. In support of the agricultural sector new means of information were introduced by, for example, agricultural societies that published periodicals on innovative methods and on market trends. Mortgage societies were established to supply agriculture with long term capital for investments that in turn intensified the commercialization of production.

All these elements meant a profound institutional change in the sense that the price mechanism became much more effective in directing human behavior. Furthermore, a greater interest in information and in the main instrument of information, namely literacy, was infused. Traditionally, popular literacy had been upheld by the church, mainly devoted to knowledge of the primary Lutheran texts. In the new economic environment, literacy was secularized and transformed into a more functional literacy marked by the advent of schools for public education in the 1840s.

The Breakthrough of Modern Economic Growth in the Mid-nineteenth Century

In the decades around the middle of the nineteenth century new dynamic forces appeared that accelerated growth. Most notably foreign trade expanded by leaps and bounds in the 1850s and 1860s. With new export sectors, industrial investments increased. Furthermore, railways became the most prominent component of a new infrastructure and with this construction a new component in Swedish growth was introduced, heavy capital imports.

The upswing in industrial growth in Western Europe during the 1850s, in combination with demand induced through the Crimean War, led to a particularly strong expansion in Swedish exports with sharp price increases for three staple goods – bar iron, wood and oats. The charcoal-based Swedish bar iron had been the traditional export good and had completely dominated Swedish exports until mid-nineteenth century. Bar iron met, however, increasingly strong competition from British and continental iron and steel industries and Swedish exports had stagnated in the first half of the nineteenth century. The upswing in international demand, following the diffusion of industrialization and railway construction, gave an impetus to the modernization of Swedish steel production in the following decades.

The saw mill industry was a really new export industry that grew dramatically in the 1850s and 1860s. Up until this time, the vast forests in Sweden had been regarded mainly as a fuel resource for the iron industry and for household heating and local residential construction. With sharp price increases on the Western European market from the 1840s and 1850s, the resources of the sparsely populated northern part of Sweden suddenly became valuable. A formidable explosion of saw mill construction at the mouths of the rivers along the northern coastline followed. Within a few decades Swedish merchants, as well as Norwegian, German, British and Dutch merchants, became saw mill owners running large-scale capitalist enterprises at the fringe of the European civilization.

Less dramatic but equally important was the sudden expansion of Swedish oat exports. The market for oats appeared mainly in Britain, where short-distance transportation in rapidly growing urban centers increased the fleet of horses. Swedish oats became an important energy resource during the decades around the mid-nineteenth century. In Sweden this had a special significance since oats could be cultivated on rather barren and marginal soils and Sweden was richly endowed with such soils. Thus, the market for oats with strongly increasing prices stimulated further the commercialization of agriculture and the diffusion of new methods. It was furthermore so since oats for the market were a substitute for local flax production – also thriving on barren soils – while domestic linen was increasingly supplanted by factory-produced cotton goods.

The Swedish economy was able to respond to the impetus from Western Europe during these decades, to diffuse the new influences in the economy and to integrate them in its development very successfully. The barriers to change seem to have been weak. This is partly explained by the prior transformation of agriculture and the evolution of market institutions in the rural economy. People reacted to the price mechanism. New social classes of commercial peasants, capitalists and wage laborers had emerged in an era of domestic market expansion, with increased regional specialization, and population increase.

The composition of export goods also contributed to the diffusion of participation and to the diffusion of export income. Iron, wood and oats meant both a regional and a social distribution. The value of prior marginal resources such as soils in the south and forests in the north was inflated. The technology was simple and labor intensive in industry, forestry, agriculture and transportation. The demand for unskilled labor increased strongly that was to put an imprint upon Swedish wage development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Commercial houses and industrial companies made profits but export income was distributed to many segments of the population.

The integration of the Swedish economy was further enforced through initiatives taken by the State. The parliament decision in the 1850s to construct the railway trunk lines meant, first, a more direct involvement by the State in the development of a modern infrastructure and, second, new principles of finance since the State had to rely upon capital imports. At the same time markets for goods, labor and capital were liberalized and integration both within Sweden and with the world market deepened. The Swedish adoption of the Gold Standard in 1873 put a final stamp on this institutional development.

A Second Industrial Revolution around 1900

In the late nineteenth century, particularly in the 1880s, international competition became fiercer for agriculture and early industrial branches. The integration of world markets led to falling prices and stagnation in the demand for Swedish staple goods such as iron, sawn wood and oats. Profits were squeezed and expansion thwarted. On the other hand there arose new markets. Increasing wages intensified mechanization both in agriculture and in industry. The demand increased for more sophisticated machinery equipment. At the same time consumer demand shifted towards better foodstuff – such as milk, butter and meat – and towards more fabricated industrial goods.

The decades around the turn of the twentieth century meant a profound structural change in the composition of Swedish industrial expansion that was crucial for long term growth. New and more sophisticated enterprises were founded and expanded particularly from the 1890s, in the upswing after the Baring Crisis.

The new enterprises were closely related to the so called Second Industrial Revolution in which scientific knowledge and more complex engineering skills were main components. The electrical motor became especially important in Sweden. A new development block was created around this innovation that combined engineering skills in companies such as ASEA (later ABB) with a large demand in energy-intensive processes and with the large supply of hydropower in Sweden.⁴ Financing the rapid development of this large block engaged commercial banks, knitting closer ties between financial capital and industry. The State, once again, engaged itself in infrastructural development in support of electrification, still resorting to heavy capital imports.

A number of innovative industries were founded in this period – all related to increased demand for mechanization and engineering skills. Companies such as AGA, ASEA, Ericsson, Separator (AlfaLaval) and SKF have been labeled “enterprises of genius” and all are represented with renowned inventors and innovators. This was, of course, not an entirely Swedish phenomenon. These branches developed simultaneously on the Continent, particularly in nearby Germany and in the U.S. Knowledge and innovative stimulus was diffused among these economies. The question is rather why this new development became so strong in Sweden so that new industries within a relatively short period of time were able to supplant old resource-based industries as main driving forces of industrialization.

Traditions of engineering skills were certainly important, developed in old heavy industrial branches such as iron and steel industries and stimulated further by State initiatives such as railway construction or, more directly, the founding of the Royal Institute of Technology. But apart from that the economic development in the second half of the nineteenth century fundamentally changed relative factor prices and the profitability of allocation of resources in different lines of production.

The relative increase in the wages of unskilled labor had been stimulated by the composition of early exports in Sweden. This was much reinforced by two components in the further development – emigration and capital imports.

Within approximately the same period, 1850-1910, the Swedish economy received a huge amount of capital mainly from Germany and France, while delivering an equally huge amount of labor to primarily the U.S. Thus, Swedish relative factor prices changed dramatically. Swedish interest rates remained at rather high levels compared to leading European countries until 1910, due to a continuous large demand for capital in Sweden, but relative wages rose persistently (see Table 5). As in the rest of Scandinavia, wage increases were much stronger than GDP growth in Sweden indicating a shift in income distribution in favor of labor, particularly in favor of unskilled labor, during this period of increased world market integration.

Table 5 Annual Increase in Real Wages of Unskilled Labor and Annual GDP Growth per Capita, 1870-1910

Sources: Wages from Williamson (1995); GDP growth see Table 1.

Relative profitability fell in traditional industries, which exploited rich natural resources and cheap labor, while more sophisticated industries were favored. But the causality runs both ways. Had this structural shift with the growth of new and more profitable industries not occurred, the Swedish economy would not have been able to sustain the wage increase.⁵

Accelerated Growth in the War-stricken Period, 1910-1950

The most notable feature of long term Swedish growth is the acceleration in growth rates during the period 1910-1950, which in Europe at large was full of problems and catastrophes.⁶ Thus, Swedish per capita production grew at 2.2 percent annually while growth in the rest of Scandinavia was somewhat below 2 percent and in the rest of Europe hovered at 1 percent. The Swedish acceleration was based mainly on three pillars.

First, the structure created at the end of the nineteenth century was very viable, with considerable long term growth potential. It consisted of new industries and new infrastructures that involved industrialists and financial capitalists, as well as public sector support. It also involved industries meeting a relatively strong demand in war times, as well as in the interwar period, both domestically and abroad.

Second, the First World War meant an immense financial bonus to the Swedish market. A huge export surplus at inflated prices during the war led to the domestication of the Swedish national debt. This in turn further capitalized the Swedish financial market, lowering interest rates and ameliorating sequential innovative activity in industry. A domestic money market arose that provided the State with new instruments for economic policy that were to become important for the implementation of the new social democratic “Keynesian” policies of the 1930s.

Third, demographic development favored the Swedish economy in this period. The share of the economically active age group 15-64 grew substantially. This was due partly to the fact that prior emigration had sized down cohorts that now would have become old age pensioners. Comparatively low mortality of young people during the 1910s, as well as an end to mass emigration further enhanced the share of the active population. Both the labor market and domestic demand was stimulated in particular during the 1930s when the household forming age group of 25-30 years increased.

The augmented labor supply would have increased unemployment had it not been combined with the richer supply of capital and innovative industrial development that met elastic demand both domestically and in Europe.

Thus, a richer supply of both capital and labor stimulated the domestic market in a period when international market integration deteriorated. Above all it stimulated the development of mass production of consumption goods based upon the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution. Significant new enterprises that emanated from the interwar period were very much related to the new logic of the industrial society, such as Volvo, SAAB, Electrolux, Tetra Pak and IKEA.

The Golden Age of Growth, 1950-1975

The Swedish economy was clearly part of the European Golden Age of growth, although Swedish acceleration from the 1950s was less pronounced than in the rest of Western Europe, which to a much larger extent had been plagued by wars and crises.⁷ The Swedish post-war period was characterized primarily by two phenomena – the full fruition of development blocks based upon the great innovations of the late nineteenth century (the electrical motor and the combustion engine) and the cementation of the “Swedish Model” for the welfare state. These two phenomena were highly complementary.

The Swedish Model had basically two components. One was a greater public responsibility for social security and for the creation and preservation of human capital. This led to a rapid increase in the supply of public services in the realms of education, health and children’s day care as well as to increases in social security programs and in public savings for transfers to pensioners program. The consequence was high taxation. The other component was a regulation of labor and capital markets. This was the most ingenious part of the model, constructed to sustain growth in the industrial society and to increase equality in combination with the social security program and taxation.

The labor market program was the result of negotiations between trade unions and the employers’ organization. It was labeled “solidaristic wage policy” with two elements. One was to achieve equal wages for equal work, regardless of individual companies’ ability to pay. The other element was to raise the wage level in low paid areas and thus to compress the wage distribution. The aim of the program was actually to increase the speed in the structural rationalization of industries and to eliminate less productive companies and branches. Labor should be transferred to the most productive export-oriented sectors. At the same time income should be distributed more equally. A drawback of the solidaristic wage policy from an egalitarian point of view was that profits soared in the productive sectors since wage increases were held back. However, capital market regulations hindered the ability of high profits to be converted into very high incomes for shareholders. Profits were taxed very low if they were converted into further investments within the company (the timing in the use of the funds was controlled by the State in its stabilization policy) but taxed heavily if distributed to share holders. The result was that investments within existing profitable companies were supported and actually subsidized while the mobility of capital dwindled and the activity at the stock market fell.

As long as the export sectors grew, the program worked well.⁸ Companies founded in the late nineteenth century and in the interwar period developed into successful multinationals in engineering with machinery, auto industries and shipbuilding, as well as in resource-based industries of steel and paper. The expansion of the export sector was the main force behind the high growth rates and the productivity increases but the sector was strongly supported by public investments or publicly subsidized investments in infrastructure and residential construction.

Hence, during the Golden Age of growth the development blocks around electrification and motorization matured in a broad modernization of the society, where mass consumption and mass production was supported by social programs, by investment programs and by labor market policy.

Crisis and Restructuring from the 1970s

In the 1970s and early 1980s a number of industries – such as steel works, pulp and paper, shipbuilding, and mechanical engineering – ran into crisis. New global competition, changing consumer behavior and profound innovative renewal, especially in microelectronics, made some of the industrial pillars of the Swedish Model crumble. At the same time the disadvantages of the old model became more apparent. It put obstacles to flexibility and to entrepreneurial initiatives and it reduced individual incentives for mobility. Thus, while the Swedish Model did foster rationalization of existing industries well adapted to the post-war period, it did not support more profound transformation of the economy.

One should not exaggerate the obstacles to transformation, though. The Swedish economy was still very open in the market for goods and many services, and the pressure to transform increased rapidly. During the 1980s a far-reaching structural change within industry as well as in economic policy took place, engaging both private and public actors. Shipbuilding was almost completely discontinued, pulp industries were integrated into modernized paper works, the steel industry was concentrated and specialized, and the mechanical engineering was digitalized. New and more knowledge-intensive growth industries appeared in the 1980s, such as IT-based telecommunication, pharmaceutical industries, and biotechnology, as well as new service industries.

During the 1980s some of the constituent components of the Swedish model were weakened or eliminated. Centralized negotiations and solidaristic wage policy disappeared. Regulations in the capital market were dismantled under the pressure of increasing international capital flows simultaneously with a forceful revival of the stock market. The expansion of public sector services came to an end and the taxation system was reformed with a reduction of marginal tax rates. Thus, Swedish economic policy and welfare system became more adapted to the main European level that facilitated the Swedish application of membership and final entrance into the European Union in 1995.

It is also clear that the period from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century comprise two growth trends, before and after 1990 respectively. During the 1970s and 1980s, growth in Sweden was very slow and marked by the great structural problems that the Swedish economy had to cope with. The slow growth prior to 1990 does not signify stagnation in a real sense, but rather the transformation of industrial structures and the reformulation of economic policy, which did not immediately result in a speed up of growth but rather in imbalances and bottle necks that took years to eliminate. From the 1990s up to 2005 Swedish growth accelerated quite forcefully in comparison with most Western economies.⁹ Thus, the 1980s may be considered as a Swedish case of “the productivity paradox,” with innovative renewal but with a delayed acceleration of productivity and growth from the 1990s – although a delayed productivity effect of more profound transformation and radical innovative behavior is not paradoxical.

Table 6 Annual Growth Rates per Capita, 1971-2005

Sources: See Table 1.

The recent acceleration in growth may also indicate that some of the basic traits from early industrialization still pertain to the Swedish economy – an international attitude in a small open economy fosters transformation and adaptation of human skills to new circumstances as a major force behind long term growth.

References

Abramovitz, Moses. “Catching Up, Forging Ahead and Falling Behind.” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 2 (1986): 385-406.

Dahmén, Erik. “Development Blocks in Industrial Economics.” Scandinavian Economic History Review 36 (1988): 3-14.

David, Paul A. “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (1980): 355-61.

Eichengreen, Barry. “Institutions and Economic Growth: Europe after World War II.” In Economic Growth in Europe since 1945, edited by Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Krantz, Olle and Lennart Schön. Swedish Historical National Accounts, 1800-2000. Lund: Almqvist and Wiksell International (forthcoming, 2007).

Maddison, Angus. The World Economy, Volumes 1 and 2. Paris: OECD (2006).

Schön, Lennart. “Development Blocks and Transformation Pressure in a Macro-Economic Perspective: A Model of Long-Cyclical Change.” Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken Quarterly Review 20, no. 3-4 (1991): 67-76.

Schön, Lennart. “External and Internal Factors in Swedish Industrialization.” Scandinavian Economic History Review 45, no. 3 (1997): 209-223.

Schön, Lennart. En modern svensk ekonomisk historia: Tillväxt och omvandling under två sekel (A Modern Swedish Economic History: Growth and Transformation in Two Centuries). Stockholm: SNS (2000).

Schön, Lennart. “Total Factor Productivity in Swedish Manufacturing in the Period 1870-2000.” In Exploring Economic Growth: Essays in Measurement and Analysis: A Festschrift for Riitta Hjerppe on Her Sixtieth Birthday, edited by S. Heikkinen and J.L. van Zanden. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2004.

Schön, Lennart. “Swedish Industrialization 1870-1930 and the Heckscher-Ohlin Theory.” In Eli Heckscher, International Trade, and Economic History, edited by Ronald Findlay et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2006).

Svennilson, Ingvar. Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy. Geneva: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1954.

Temin, Peter. “The Golden Age of European Growth Reconsidered.” European Review of Economic History 6, no. 1 (2002): 3-22.

Williamson, Jeffrey G. “The Evolution of Global Labor Markets since 1830: Background Evidence and Hypotheses.” Explorations in Economic History 32, no. 2 (1995): 141-96.

Citation: Schön, Lennart. “Sweden – Economic Growth and Structural Change, 1800-2000”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. February 10, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/sweden-economic-growth-and-structural-change-1800-2000/

B. Zorina Khan, Bowdoin College

Introduction

Such scholars as Max Weber and Douglass North have suggested that intellectual property systems had an important impact on the course of economic development. However, questions from other eras are still current today, ranging from whether patents and copyrights constitute optimal policies toward intellectual inventions and their philosophical rationale to the growing concerns of international political economy. Throughout their history, patent and copyright regimes have confronted and accommodated technological innovations that were no less significant and contentious for their time than those of the twenty-first century. An economist from the nineteenth century would have been equally familiar with considerations about whether uniformity in intellectual property rights across countries harmed or benefited global welfare and whether piracy might be to the advantage of developing countries. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in particular witnessed considerable variation in the intellectual property policies that individual countries implemented, and this allows economic historians to determine the consequences of different rules and standards.

This article outlines crucial developments in the patent policies of Europe, the United States, and follower countries. The final section discusses the harmonization of international patent laws that occurred after the middle of the nineteenth century.

Europe

The British Patent System

The grant of exclusive property rights vested in patents developed from medieval guild practices in Europe. Britain in particular is noted for the establishment of a patent system which has been in continuous operation for a longer period than any other in the world. English monarchs frequently used patents to reward favorites with privileges, such as monopolies over trade that increased the retail prices of commodities. It was not until the seventeenth century that patents were associated entirely with awards to inventors, when Section 6 of the Statute of Monopolies (21 Jac. I. C. 3, 1623, implemented in 1624) repealed the practice of royal monopoly grants to all except patentees of inventions. The Statute of Monopolies allowed patent rights of fourteen years for “the sole making or working of any manner of new manufacture within this realm to the first and true inventor…” Importers of foreign discoveries were allowed to obtain domestic patent protection in their own right.

The British patent system established significant barriers in the form of prohibitively high costs that limited access to property rights in invention to a privileged few. Patent fees for England alone amounted to £100-£120 ($585) or approximately four times per capita income in 1860. The fee for a patent that also covered Scotland and Ireland could cost as much as £350 pounds ($1,680). Adding a co-inventor was likely to increase the costs by another £24. Patents could be extended only by a private Act of Parliament, which required political influence, and extensions could cost as much as £700. These constraints favored the elite class of those with wealth, political connections or exceptional technical qualifications, and consciously created disincentives for inventors from humble backgrounds. Patent fees provided an important source of revenues for the Crown and its employees, and created a class of administrators who had strong incentives to block proposed reforms.

In addition to the monetary costs, complicated administrative procedures that inventors had to follow implied that transactions costs were also high. Patent applications for England alone had to pass through seven offices, from the Home Secretary to the Lord Chancellor, and twice required the signature of the Sovereign. If the patent were extended to Scotland and Ireland it was necessary to negotiate another five offices in each country. The cumbersome process of patent applications (variously described as “mediaeval” and “fantastical”) afforded ample material for satire, but obviously imposed severe constraints on the ordinary inventor who wished to obtain protection for his discovery. These features testify to the much higher monetary and transactions costs, in both absolute and relative terms, of obtaining property rights to inventions in England in comparison to the United States. Such costs essentially restricted the use of the patent system to inventions of high value and to applicants who already possessed or could raise sufficient capital to apply for the patent. The complicated system also inhibited the diffusion of information and made it difficult, if not impossible, for inventors outside of London to readily conduct patent searches. Patent specifications were open to public inspection on payment of a fee, but until 1852 they were not officially printed, published or indexed. Since the patent could be filed in any of three offices in Chancery, searches of the prior art involved much time and inconvenience. Potential patentees were well advised to obtain the help of a patent agent to aid in negotiating the numerous steps and offices that were required for pursuit of the application in London.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, nation-wide lobbies of manufacturers and patentees expressed dissatisfaction with the operation of the British patent system. However, it was not until after the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 that their concerns were finally addressed, in an effort to meet the burgeoning competition from the United States. In 1852 the efforts of numerous societies and of individual engineers, inventors and manufacturers over many decades were finally rewarded. Parliament approved the Patent Law Amendment Act, which authorized the first major adjustment of the system in two centuries. The new patent statutes incorporated features that drew on testimonials to the superior functioning of the American patent regime. Significant changes in the direction of the American system included lower fees and costs, and the application procedures were rationalized into a single Office of the Commissioners of Patents for Inventions, or “Great Seal Patent Office.”

The 1852 patent reform bills included calls for a U.S.-style examination system but this was amended in the House of Commons and the measure was not included in the final version. Opponents were reluctant to vest examiners with the necessary discretionary power, and pragmatic observers pointed to the shortage of a cadre of officials with the required expertise. The law established a renewal system that required the payment of fees in installments if the patentee wished to maintain the patent for the full term. Patentees initially paid £25 and later installments of £50 (after three years) and £100 (after seven years) to maintain the patent for a full term of fourteen years. Despite the relatively low number of patents granted in England, between 1852 and 1880 the patent office still made a profit of over £2 million. Provision was made for the printing and publication of the patent records. The 1852 reforms undoubtedly instituted improvements over the former opaque procedures, and the lower fees had an immediate impact. Nevertheless, the system retained many of the former features that had implied that patents were in effect viewed as privileges rather than merited rights, and only temporarily abated expressions of dissatisfaction.

One source of dissatisfaction that endured until the end of the nineteenth century was the state of the common law regarding patents. At least partially in reaction to a history of abuse of patent privileges, patents were widely viewed as monopolies that restricted community rights, and thus to be carefully monitored and narrowly construed. Second, British patents were granted “by the grace of the Crown” and therefore were subject to any restrictions that the government cared to impose. According to the statutes, as a matter of national expediency, patents were to be granted if “they be not contrary to the law, nor mischievous to the State, by raising prices of commodities at home, or to the hurt of trade, or generally inconvenient.” The Crown possessed the ability to revoke any patents that were deemed inconvenient or contrary to public policy. After 1855, the government could also appeal to a need for official secrecy to prohibit the publication of patent specifications in order to protect national security and welfare. Moreover, the state could commandeer a patentee’s invention without compensation or consent, although in some cases the patentee was paid a royalty.

Policies towards patent assignments and trade in intellectual property rights also constrained the market for inventions. Ever vigilant to protect an unsuspecting public from fraudulent financial schemes on the scale of the South Sea Bubble, ownership of patent rights was limited to five investors (later extended to twelve). Nevertheless, the law did not offer any relief to the purchaser of an invalid or worthless patent, so potential purchasers were well advised to engage in extensive searches before entering into contracts. When coupled with the lack of assurance inherent in a registration system, the purchase of a patent right involved a substantive amount of risk and high transactions costs — all indicative of a speculative instrument. It is therefore not surprising that the market for assignments and licenses seems to have been quite limited, and even in the year after the 1852 reforms only 273 assignments were recorded.

In 1883 new legislation introduced procedures that were somewhat simpler, with fewer steps. The fees fell to £4 for the initial term of four years, and the remaining £150 could be paid in annual increments. For the first time, applications could be forwarded to the Patent Office through the post office. This statute introduced opposition proceedings, which enabled interested parties to contest the proposed patent within two months of the filing of the patent specifications. Compulsory licenses were introduced in 1883 (and strengthened in 1919 as “licenses of right”) for fear that foreign inventors might injure British industry by refusing to grant other manufacturers the right to use their patent. The 1883 act provided for the employment of “examiners” but their activity was limited to ensuring that the material was patentable and properly described. Indeed, it was not until 1902 that the British system included an examination for novelty, and even then the process was not regarded as stringent as in other countries. Many new provisions were designed to thwart foreign competition. Until 1907 patentees who manufactured abroad were required to also make the patented product in Britain. Between 1919 and 1949 chemical products were excluded from patent protection to counter the threat posed by the superior German chemical industry. Licenses of right enabled British manufacturers to compel foreign patentees to permit the use of their patents on pharmaceuticals and food products.

In sum, changes in the British patent system were initially unforthcoming despite numerous calls for change. Ultimately, the realization that England’s early industrial and technological supremacy was threatened by the United States and other nations in Europe led to a slow process of revisions that lasted well into the twentieth century. One commentator summed up the series of developments by declaring that the British patent system at the time of writing (1967) remained essentially “a modified version of a pre-industrial economic institution.”

The French Patent System

Early French policies towards inventions and innovations in the eighteenth century were based on an extensive but somewhat arbitrary array of rewards and incentives. During this period inventors or introducers of inventions could benefit from titles, pensions that sometimes extended to spouses and offspring, loans (some interest-free), lump-sum grants, bounties or subsidies for production, exemptions from taxes, or monopoly grants in the form of exclusive privileges. This complex network of state policies towards inventors and their inventions was revised but not revoked after the outbreak of the French Revolution.

The modern French patent system was established according to the laws of 1791 (amended in 1800) and 1844. Patentees filed through a simple registration system without any need to specify what was new about their claim, and could persist in obtaining the grant even if warned that the patent was likely to be legally invalid. On each patent document the following caveat was printed: “The government, in granting a patent without prior examination, does not in any manner guarantee either the priority, merit or success of an invention.” The inventor decided whether to obtain a patent for a period of five, ten or fifteen years, and the term could only be extended through legislative action. Protection extended to all methods and manufactured articles, but excluded theoretical or scientific discoveries without practical application, financial methods, medicines, and items that could be covered by copyright.

The 1791 statute stipulated patent fees that were costly, ranging from 300 livres through 1500 livres, based on the declared term of the patent. The 1844 statute maintained this policy since fees were set at 500 francs ($100) for a five year patent, 1000 francs for a 10 year patent and 1500 for a patent of fifteen years, payable in annual installments. In an obvious attempt to limit international diffusion of French discoveries, until 1844 patents were voided if the inventor attempted to obtain a patent overseas on the same invention. On the other hand, the first introducer of an invention covered by a foreign patent would enjoy the same “natural rights” as the patentee of an original invention or improvement. Patentees had to put the invention into practice within two years from the initial grant, or face a tribunal which had the power to repeal the patent, unless the patentee could point to unforeseen events which had prevented his complying with the provisions of the law. The rights of patentees were also restricted if the invention related to items that were controlled by the French government, such as printing presses and firearms.

In return for the limited monopoly right, the patentee was expected to describe the invention in such terms that a workman skilled in the arts could replicate the invention and this information was expected to be made public. However, no provision was made for the publication or diffusion of these descriptions. At least until the law of April 7 1902, specifications were only available in manuscript form in the office in which they had originally been lodged, and printed information was limited to brief titles in patent indexes. The attempt to obtain information on the prior art was also inhibited by restrictions placed on access: viewers had to state their motives; foreigners had to be assisted by French attorneys; and no extract from the manuscript could be copied until the patent had expired.

The state remained involved in the discretionary promotion of invention and innovation through policies beyond the granting of patents. In the first place, the patent statutes did not limit their offer of potential appropriation of returns only to property rights vested in patents. The inventor of a discovery of proven utility could choose between a patent or making a gift of the invention to the nation in exchange for an award from funds that were set aside for the encouragement of industry. Second, institutions such as the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale awarded a number of medals each year to stimulate new discoveries in areas they considered to be worth pursuing, and also to reward deserving inventors and manufacturers. Third, the award of assistance and pensions to inventors and their families continued well into the nineteenth century. Fourth, at times the Society purchased patent rights and turned the invention over into the public domain.

The basic principles of the modern French patent system were evident in the early French statutes and were retained in later revisions. Since France during the ancien régime was likely the first country to introduce systematic examinations of applications for privileges, it is somewhat ironic that commentators point to the retention of registration without prior examination as the defining feature of the “French system” until 1978. In 1910 fees remained high, although somewhat lower in real terms, at one hundred francs per year. Working requirements were still in place, and patentees were not allowed to satisfy the requirement by importing the article even if the patentee had manufactured it in another European country. However, the requirement was waived if the patentee could persuade the tribunal that the patent was not worked because of unavoidable circumstances.

Similar problems were evident in the market for patent rights. Contracts for patent assignments were filed in the office of the Prefect for the district, but since there was no central source of information it was difficult to trace the records for specific inventions. The annual fees for the entire term of the patent had to be paid in advance if the patent was assigned to a second party. Like patents themselves, assignments and licenses were issued with a caveat emptor clause. This was partially due to the nature of patent property under a registration system, and partially to the uncertainties of legal jurisprudence in this area. For both buyer and seller, the uncertainties associated with the exchange likely reduced the net expected value of trade.

The Spanish Patent System

French patent laws were adopted in its colonies, but also diffused to other countries through its influence on Spain’s system following the Spanish Decree of 1811. The Spanish experience during the nineteenth century is instructive since this country experienced lower rates and levels of economic development than the early industrializers. Like its European neighbors, early Spanish rules and institutions were vested in privileges which had lasting effects that could be detected even in the later period. The per capita rate of patenting in Spain was lower than other major European countries, and foreigners filed the majority of patented inventions. Between 1759 and 1878, roughly one half of all grants were to citizens of other countries, notably France and (to a lesser extent) Britain. Thus, the transfer of foreign technology was a major concern in the political economy of Spain.

This dependence on foreign technologies was reflected in the structure of the Spanish patent system, which permitted patents of introduction as well as patents for invention. Patents of introduction were granted to entrepreneurs who wished to produce foreign technologies that were new to Spain, with no requirement of claims to being the true inventor. Thus, the sole objective of these instruments was to enhance innovation and production in Spain. Since the owners of introduction patents could not prevent third parties from importing similar machines from abroad, they also had an incentive to maintain reasonable pricing structures. Introduction patents had a term of only five years, with a cost of 3000 reales, whereas the fees of patents for invention varied from 1000 reales for five years, 3000 reales for ten years, and 6000 reales for a term of fifteen years. Patentees were required to work the patent within one year, and about a quarter of patents granted between 1826 and 1878 were actually implemented. Since patents of introduction had a brief term, they encouraged the production of items with high expected profits and a quick payback period, after which monopoly rights expired, and the country could benefit from its diffusion.

The German Patent System

The German patent system was influenced by developments in the United States, and itself influenced legislation in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Holland, Norway, Poland, Russia and Sweden. The German Empire was founded in 1871, and in the first six years each state adopted its own policies. Alsace-Lorraine favored a French-style system, whereas others such as Hamburg and Bremen did not offer patent protection. However, after strong lobbying by supporters of both sides of the debate regarding the merits of patent regimes, Germany passed a unified national Patent Act of 1877.

The 1877 statute created a centralized administration for the grant of a federal patent for original inventions. Industrial entrepreneurs succeeded in their objective of creating a “first to file” system, so patents were granted to the first applicant rather than to the “first and true inventor,” but in 1936 the National Socialists introduced a first to invent system. Applications were examined by examiners in the Patent Office who were expert in their field. During the eight weeks before the grant, patent applications were open to the public and an opposition could be filed denying the validity of the patent. German patent fees were deliberately high to eliminate protection for trivial inventions, with a renewal system that required payment of 30 marks for the first year, 50 marks for the second year, 100 marks for the third, and 50 marks annually after the third year. In 1923 the patent term was extended from fifteen years to eighteen years.

German patent policies encouraged diffusion, innovation and growth in specific industries with a view to fostering economic development. Patents could not be obtained for food products, pharmaceuticals or chemical products, although the process through which such items were produced could be protected. It has been argued that the lack of restrictions on the use of innovations and the incentives to patent around existing processes spurred productivity and diffusion in these industries. The authorities further ensured the diffusion of patent information by publishing claims and specification before they were granted. The German patent system also facilitated the use of inventions by firms, with the early application of a “work for hire” doctrine that allowed enterprises access to the rights and benefits of inventions of employees.

Although the German system was close to the American patent system, it was in other ways more stringent, resulting in patent grants that were lower in number, but likely higher in average value. The patent examination process required that the patent should be new, nonobvious, and also capable of producing greater efficiency. As in the United States, once granted, the courts adopted an extremely liberal attitude in interpreting and enforcing existing patent rights. Penalties for willful infringement included not only fines, but also the possibility of imprisonment. The grant of a patent could be revoked after the first three years if the patent was not worked, if the owner refused to grant licenses for the use of an invention that was deemed in the public interest, or if the invention was primarily being exploited outside of Germany. However, in most cases, a compulsory license was regarded as adequate.

After 1891 a parallel and weaker version of patent protection could be obtained through a gebrauchsmuster or utility patent (sometimes called a petty patent), which was granted through a registration system. Patent protection was available for inventions that could be represented by drawings or models with only a slight degree of novelty, and for a limited term of three years (renewable once for a total life of six years). About twice as many utility patents as examined patents were granted early in the 1930s. Patent protection based on co-existing systems of registration and examination appears to have served distinct but complementary purposes. Remedies for infringement of utility patents also included fines and imprisonment.

Other European Patent Systems

Very few developed countries would now seriously consider eliminating statutory protection for inventions, but in the second half of the nineteenth century the “patent controversy” in Europe pitted advocates of patent rights against an effective abolitionist movement. For a short period, the abolitionists were strong enough to obtain support for dismantling patent systems in a number of European countries. In 1863 the Congress of German Economists declared “patents of invention are injurious to common welfare;” and the movement achieved its greatest victory in Holland, which repealed its patent legislation in 1869. The Swiss cantons did not adopt patent protection until 1888, with an extension in the scope of coverage in 1907. The abolitionists based their arguments on the benefits of free trade and competition, and viewed patents as part of an anticompetitive and protectionist strategy analogous to tariffs on imports. Instead of state-sponsored monopoly awards, they argued, inventors could be rewarded by alternative policies, such as stipends from the government, payments from private industry or associations formed for that purpose, or simply through the lead time that the first inventor acquired over competitors by virtue of his prior knowledge.

According to one authority, the Netherlands eventually reinstated its patent system in 1912 and Switzerland introduced patent laws in 1888 largely because of a keen sense of morality, national pride and international pressure to do so. The appeal to “morality” as an explanatory factor is incapable of explaining the timing and nature of changes in strategies. Nineteenth-century institutions were not exogenous and their introduction or revisions generally reflected the outcome of a self-interested balancing of costs and benefits. The Netherlands and Switzerland were initially able to benefit from their ability to free-ride on the investments that other countries had made in technological advances. As for the cost of lower incentives for discoveries by domestic inventors, the Netherlands was never vaunted as a leader in technological innovation, and this is reflected in their low per capita patenting rates both before and after the period without patent laws. They recorded a total of only 4561 patents in the entire period from 1800 to 1869 and, even after adjusting for population, the Dutch patenting rate in 1869 was a mere 13.4 percent of the U.S. patenting rate. Moreover, between 1851 and 1865 88.6 percent of patents in the Netherlands had been granted to foreigners. After the patent laws were reintroduced in 1912, the major beneficiaries were again foreign inventors, who obtained 79.3 of the patents issued in the Netherlands. Thus, the Netherlands had little reason to adopt patent protection, except for external political pressures and the possibility that some types of foreign investment might be deterred.

The case was somewhat different for Switzerland, which was noted for being innovative, but in a narrow range of pursuits. Since the scale of output and markets were quite limited, much of Swiss industry generated few incentives for invention. A number of the industries in which the Swiss excelled, such as hand-made watches, chocolates and food products, were less susceptible to invention that warranted patent protection. For instance, despite the much larger consumer market in the United States, during the entire nineteenth century fewer than 300 U.S. patents related to chocolate composition or production. Improvements in pursuits such as watch-making could be readily protected by trade secrecy as long as the industry remained artisanal. However, with increased mechanization and worker mobility, secrecy would ultimately prove to be ineffective, and innovators would be unable to appropriate returns without more formal means of exclusion.

According to contemporary observers, the Swiss resolved to introduce patent legislation not because of a sudden newfound sense of morality, but because they feared that American manufacturers were surpassing them as a result of patented innovations in the mass production of products such as boots, shoes and watches. Indeed, before 1890, American inventors obtained more than 2068 patents on watches, and the U.S. watch making industry benefited from mechanization and strong economies of scale that led to rapidly falling prices of output, making them more competitive internationally. The implications are that the rates of industrial and technical progress in the United States were more rapid, and technological change was rendering artisanal methods obsolete in products with mass markets. Thus, the Swiss endogenously adopted patent laws because of falling competitiveness in their key industrial sectors.

What was the impact of the introduction of patent protection in Switzerland? Foreign inventors could obtain patents in the United States regardless of their domestic legislation, so we can approach this question tangentially by examining the patterns of patenting in the United States by Swiss residents before and after the 1888 reforms. Between 1836 and 1888, Swiss residents obtained a grand total of 585 patents in the United States. Fully a third of these patents were for watches and music boxes, and only six were for textiles or dyeing, industries in which Switzerland was regarded as competitive early on. Swiss patentees were more oriented to the international market, rather than the small and unprotected domestic market where they could not hope to gain as much from their inventions. For instance, in 1872 Jean-Jacques Mullerpack of Basel collaborated with Leon Jarossonl of Lille, France to invent an improvement in dyeing black with aniline colors, which they assigned to William Morgan Brown of London, England. Another Basel inventor, Alfred Kern, assigned his 1883 patent for violet aniline dyes to the Badische Anilin and Soda Fabrik of Mannheim, Germany.

After the patent reforms, the rate of Swiss patenting in the United States immediately increased. Swiss patentees obtained an annual average of 32.8 patents in the United States in the decade before the patent law was enacted in Switzerland. After the Swiss allowed patenting, this figure increased to an average of 111 each year in the following six years, and in the period from 1895 to 1900 a total of 821 Swiss patents were filed in the United States. The decadal rate of patenting per million residents increased from 111.8 for the ten years up to the reforms, to 451 per million residents in the 1890s, 513 in the 1900s, 458 in the 1910s and 684 in the 1920s. U.S. statutes required worldwide novelty, and patents could not be granted for discoveries that had been in prior use, so the increase was not due to a backlog of trade secrets that were now patented.

Moreover, the introduction of Swiss patent laws also affected the direction of inventions that Swiss residents patented in the United States. After the passage of the law, such patents covered a much broader range of inventions, including gas generators, textile machines, explosives, turbines, paints and dyes, and drawing instruments and lamps. The relative importance of watches and music boxes immediately fell from about a third before the reforms to 6.2 percent and 2.1 percent respectively in the 1890s and even further to 3.8 percent and 0.3 percent between 1900 and 1909. Another indication that international patenting was not entirely unconnected to domestic Swiss inventions can be discerned from the fraction of Swiss patents (filed in the U.S.) that related to process innovations. Before 1888, 21 percent of the patent specifications mentioned a process. Between 1888 and 1907, the Swiss statutes included the requirement that patents should include mechanical models, which precluded patenting of pure processes. The fraction of specifications that mentioned a process fell during the period between 1888 and 1907, but returned to 22 percent when the restriction was modified in 1907.

In short, although the Swiss experience is often cited as proof of the redundancy of patent protection, the limitations of this special case should be taken into account. The domestic market was quite small and offered minimal opportunity or inducements for inventors to take advantage of economies of scale or cost-reducing innovations. Manufacturing tended to cluster in a few industries where innovation was largely irrelevant, such as premium chocolates, or in artisanal production that was susceptible to trade secrecy, such as watches and music boxes. In other areas, notably chemicals, dyes and pharmaceuticals, Swiss industries were export-oriented, but even today their output tends to be quite specialized and high-valued rather than mass-produced. Export-oriented inventors were likely to have been more concerned about patent protection in the important overseas markets, rather than in the home market. Thus, between 1888 and 1907, although Swiss laws excluded patents for chemicals, pharmaceuticals and dyes, 20.7 percent of the Swiss patents filed in the United States were for just these types of inventions. The scanty evidence on Switzerland suggests that the introduction of patent rights was accompanied by changes in the rate and direction of inventive activity. In any event, both the Netherlands and Switzerland featured unique circumstances that seem to hold few lessons for developing countries today.

The Patent System in the United States

The United States stands out as having established one of the most successful patent systems in the world. Over six million patents have been issued since 1790, and American industrial supremacy has frequently been credited to its favorable treatment of inventors and the inducements held out for inventive activity. The first Article of the U.S. Constitution included a clause to “promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Congress complied by passing a patent statute in April 1790. The United States created in 1836 the first modern patent institution in the world, a system whose features differed in significant respects from those of other major countries. The historical record indicates that the legislature’s creation of a uniquely American system was a deliberate and conscious process of promoting open access to the benefits of private property rights in inventions. The laws were enforced by a judiciary which was willing to grapple with difficult questions such as the extent to which a democratic and market-oriented political economy was consistent with exclusive rights. Courts explicitly attempted to implement decisions that promoted economic growth and social welfare.

The primary feature of the “American system” is that all applications are subject to an examination for conformity with the laws and for novelty. An examination system was set in place in 1790, when a select committee consisting of the Secretary of State (Thomas Jefferson), the Attorney General and the Secretary of War scrutinized the applications. These duties proved to be too time-consuming for highly ranked officials who had other onerous duties, so three years later it was replaced by a registration system. The validity of patents was left up to the district courts, which had the power to set in motion a process that could end in the repeal of the patent. However by the 1830s this process was viewed as cumbersome and the statute that was passed in 1836 set in place the essential structure of the current patent system. In particular, the 1836 Patent Law established the Patent Office, whose trained and technically qualified employees were authorized to examine applications. Employees of the Patent Office were not permitted to obtain patent rights. In order to constrain the ability of examiners to engage in arbitrary actions, the applicant was given the right to file a bill in equity to contest the decisions of the Patent Office with the further right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.

American patent policy likewise stands out in its insistence on affordable fees. The legislature debated the question of appropriate fees, and the first patent law in 1790 set the rate at the minimal sum of $3.70 plus copy costs. In 1793 the fees were increased to $30, and were maintained at this level until 1861. In that year, they were raised to $35, and the term of the patent was changed from fourteen years (with the possibility of an extension) to seventeen years (with no extensions.) The 1869 Report of the Commissioner of Patents compared the $35 fee for a US patent to the significantly higher charges in European countries such as Britain, France, Russia ($450), Belgium ($420) and Austria ($350). The Commissioner speculated that both the private and social costs of patenting were lower in a system of impartial specialized examiners, than under a system where similar services were performed on a fee-per-service basis by private solicitors. He pointed out that in the U.S. the fees were not intended to exact a price for the patent privilege or to raise revenues for the state – the disclosure of information was the sole price for the patent property right – rather, they were imposed merely to cover the administrative expenses of the Office.

The basic parameters of the U.S. patent system were transparent and predictable, in itself an aid to those who wished to obtain patent rights. In addition, American legislators were concerned with ensuring that information about the stock of patented knowledge was readily available and diffused rapidly. As early as 1805 Congress stipulated that the Secretary of State should publish an annual list of patents granted the preceding year, and after 1832 also required the publication in newspapers of notices regarding expired patents. The Patent Office itself was a source of centralized information on the state of the arts. However, Congress was also concerned with the question of providing for decentralized access to patent materials. The Patent Office maintained repositories throughout the country, where inventors could forward their patent models at the expense of the Patent Office. Rural inventors could apply for patents without significant obstacles, because applications could be submitted by mail free of postage.

American laws employed the language of the English statute in granting patents to “the first and true inventor.” Nevertheless, unlike in England, the phrase was used literally, to grant patents for inventions that were original in the world, not simply within U.S. borders. American patent laws provided strong protection for citizens of the United States, but varied over time in its treatment of foreign inventors. Americans could not obtain patents for imported discoveries, but the earliest statutes of 1793, 1800 and 1832, restricted patent property to citizens or to residents who declared that they intended to become citizens. As such, while an American could not appropriate patent rights to a foreign invention, he could freely use the idea without any need to bear licensing or similar costs that would otherwise have been due if the inventor had been able to obtain a patent in this country. In 1836, the stipulations on citizenship or residency were removed, but were replaced with discriminatory patent fees: foreigners could obtain a patent in the U.S. for a fee of three hundred dollars, or five hundred if they were British. After 1861 patent rights (with the exception of caveats) were available to all applicants on the same basis without regard to nationality.

The American patent system was based on the presumption that social welfare coincided with the individual welfare of inventors. Accordingly, legislators rejected restrictions on the rights of American inventors. However, the 1832 and 1836 laws stipulated that foreigners had to exploit their patented invention within eighteen months. These clauses seem to have been interpreted by the courts in a fairly liberal fashion, since alien patentees “need not prove that they hawked the patented improvement to obtain a market for it, or that they endeavored to sell it to any person, but that it rested upon those who sought to defeat the patent to prove that the plaintiffs neglected or refused to sell the patented invention for reasonable prices when application was made to them to purchase.” Such provisions proved to be temporary aberrations and were not included in subsequent legislation. Working requirements or compulsory licenses were regarded as unwarranted infringements of the rights of “meritorious inventors,” and incompatible with the philosophy of U.S. patent grants. Patentees were not required to pay annuities to maintain their property, there were no opposition proceedings, and once granted a patent could not be revoked unless there was proven evidence of fraud.

One of the advantages of a system that secures property rights is that it facilitates contracts and trade. Assignments provide a straightforward index of the effectiveness of the American system, since trade in inventions would hardly proliferate if patent rights were uncertain or worthless. An extensive national network of licensing and assignments developed early on, aided by legal rulings that overturned contracts for useless or fraudulent patents. In 1845 the Patent Office recorded 2,108 assignments, which can be compared to the cumulative stock of 7188 patents that were still in force in that year. By the 1870s the number of assignments averaged over 9000 assignments per year, and this increased in the next decade to over 12,000 transactions recorded annually. This flourishing market for patented inventions provided an incentive for further inventive activity for inventors who were able to appropriate the returns from their efforts, and also linked patents and productivity growth.

Property rights are worth little unless they can be legally enforced in a consistent, certain, and predictable manner. A significant part of the explanation for the success of the American intellectual property system relates to the efficiency with which the laws were interpreted and implemented. United States federal courts from their inception attempted to establish a store of doctrine that fulfilled the intent of the Constitution to secure the rights of intellectual property owners. The judiciary acknowledged that inventive efforts varied with the extent to which inventors could appropriate the returns on their discoveries, and attempted to ensure that patentees were not unjustly deprived of the benefits from their inventions. Numerous reported decisions before the early courts declared that, rather than unwarranted monopolies, patent rights were “sacred” and to be regarded as the just recompense to inventive ingenuity. Early courts had to grapple with a number of difficult issues, such as the appropriate measure of damages, disputes between owners of conflicting patents, and how to protect the integrity of contracts when the law altered. Changes inevitably occurred when litigants and judiciary both adapted to a more complex inventive and economic environment. However, the system remained true to the Constitution in the belief that the defense of rights in patented invention was important in fostering industrial and economic development.

Economists such as Joseph Schumpeter have linked market concentration and innovation, and patent rights are often felt to encourage the establishment of monopoly enterprises. Thus, an important aspect of the enforcement of patents and intellectual property in general depends on competition or antitrust policies. The attitudes of the judiciary towards patent conflicts are primarily shaped by their interpretation of the monopoly aspect of the patent grant. The American judiciary in the early nineteenth century did not recognize patents as monopolies, arguing that patentees added to social welfare through innovations which had never existed before, whereas monopolists secured to themselves rights that already belong to the public. Ultimately, the judiciary came to openly recognize that the enforcement and protection of all property rights involved trade-offs between individual monopoly benefits and social welfare.

The passage of the Sherman Act in 1890 was associated with a populist emphasis on the need to protect the public from corporate monopolies, including those based on patent protection, and raised the prospect of conflicts between patent policies and the promotion of social welfare through industrial competition. Firms have rarely been charged directly with antitrust violations based on patent issues. At the same time, a number of landmark restraint of trade lawsuits have involved technological innovators. In the early decades of the 20th century these included innovative enterprises such as John Deere & Co., American Can and International Harvester, through to the numerous cases since 1970 against IBM, Xerox, Eastman Kodak and, most recently, Intel and Microsoft. The evidence suggests that, holding other factors constant, more innovative firms and those with larger patent stocks are more likely to be charged with antitrust violations. A growing fraction of cases involve firms jointly charged with antitrust violations that are linked to patent based market power and to concerns about “innovation markets.”

The Japanese Patent System

Japan emerged from the Meiji era as a follower nation which deliberately designed institutions to try to emulate those of the most advanced industrial countries. Accordingly, in 1886 Takahashi Korekiyo was sent on a mission to examine patent systems in Europe and the United States. The Japanese envoy was not favorably impressed with the European countries in this regard. Instead, he reported: ” … we have looked about us to see what nations are the greatest, so that we could be like them; … and we said, `What is it that makes the United States such a great nation?’ and we investigated and we found it was patents, and we will have patents.” The first national patent statute in Japan was passed in 1888, and copied many features of the U.S. system, including the examination procedures.

However, even in the first statute, differences existed that reflected Japanese priorities and the “wise eclecticism of Japanese legislators.” For instance, patents were not granted to foreigners, protection could not be obtained for fashion, food products, or medicines, patents that were not worked within three years could be revoked, and severe remedies were imposed for infringement, including penal servitude. After Japan became a signatory of the Paris Convention a new law was passed in 1899, which amended existing legislation to accord with the agreements of the Convention, and extended protection to foreigners. The influence of the German laws were evident in subsequent reforms in 1909 (petty or utility patents were protected) and 1921 (protection was removed from chemical products, work for hire doctrines were adopted, and an opposition procedure was introduced). The Act of 1921 also permitted the state to revoke a patent grant on payment of appropriate compensation if it was deemed in the public interest. Medicines, food and chemical products could not be patented, but protection could be obtained for processes relating to their manufacture.

The modern Japanese patent system is an interesting amalgam of features drawn from the major patent institutions in the world. Patent applications are filed, and the applicants then have seven years within which they can request an examination. Before 1996 examined patents were published prior to the actual grant, and could be opposed before the final grant; but at present, opposition can only occur in the first six months after the initial grant. Patents are also given for utility models or incremental inventions which are required to satisfy a lower standard of novelty and nonobviousness and can be more quickly commercialized. It has been claimed that the Japanese system favors the filing of a plethora of narrowly defined claims for utility models that build on the more substantive contributions of patent grants, leading to the prospect of an anti-commons through “patent flooding.” Others argue that utility models aid diffusion and innovation in the early stages of the patent term, and that the pre-grant publication of patent specifications also promotes diffusion.

Harmonization of International Patent Laws

Today very few developed countries would seriously consider eliminating statutory protection for intellectual property, but in the second half of the nineteenth century the “patent controversy” pitted advocates of patent rights against an effective abolitionist movement. For a short period the latter group was strong enough to obtain support in favor of dismantling the patent systems in countries such as England, and in 1863 the Congress of German Economists declared “patents of invention are injurious to common welfare.” The movement achieved its greatest victory in Holland, which repealed its patent legislation in 1869. The abolitionists based their arguments on the benefits of free trade and competition and viewed patents as part of a protectionist strategy analogous to tariffs. Instead of monopoly awards to inventors, their efforts could be rewarded by alternative policies, such as stipends from the government, payments from private industry or associations formed for that purpose, or simply through the lead time that the first inventor acquired over competitors by virtue of his prior knowledge.

The decisive victory of the patent proponents shifted the focus of interest to the other extreme, and led to efforts to attain uniformity in intellectual property rights regimes across countries. Part of the impetus for change occurred because the costs of discordant national rules became more burdensome as the volume of international trade in industrial products grew over time. Americans were also concerned about the lack of protection accorded to their exhibits in the increasingly more prominent World’s Fairs. Indeed, the first international patent convention was held in Austria in 1873, at the suggestion of U.S. policy makers, who wanted to be certain that their inventors would be adequately protected at the International Exposition in Vienna that year. It also yielded an opportunity to protest the provisions in Austrian law which discriminated against foreigners, including a requirement that patents had to be worked within one year or risk invalidation. The Vienna Convention adopted several resolutions, including a recommendation that the United States opposed, in favor of compulsory licenses if they were deemed in the public interest. However, the convention followed U.S. lead and did not approve compulsory working requirements.

International conventions proliferated in subsequent years, and their tenor tended to reflect the opinions of the conveners. Their objective was not to reach compromise solutions that would reflect the needs and wishes of all participants, but rather to promote preconceived ideas. The overarching goal was to pursue uniform international patent laws, although there was little agreement about the finer points of these laws. It became clear that the goal of complete uniformity was not practicable, given the different objectives, ideologies and economic circumstances of participants. Nevertheless, in 1884 the International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property was signed by Belgium, Portugal, France, Guatemala, Italy, the Netherlands, San Salvador, Serbia, Spain and Switzerland. The United States became a member in 1887, and a significant number of developing countries followed suit, including Brazil, Bulgaria, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ceylon, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago and Indonesia, among others.

The United States was the most prolific patenting nation in the world, many of the major American enterprises owed their success to patents and were expanding into international markets, and the U.S. patent system was recognized as the most successful. It is therefore not surprising that patent harmonization implied convergence towards the American model despite resistance from other nations. Countries such as Germany were initially averse to extending equal protection to foreigners because they feared that their domestic industry would be overwhelmed by American patents. Ironically, because its patent laws were the most liberal towards patentees, the United States found itself with weaker bargaining abilities than nations who could make concessions by changing their provisions. The U.S. pressed for the adoption of reciprocity (which would ensure that American patentees were treated as favorably abroad as in the United States) but this principle was rejected in favor of “national treatment” (American patentees were to be granted the same rights as nationals of the foreign country). This likely influenced the U.S. tendency to use bilateral trade sanctions rather than multilateral conventions to obtain reforms in international patent policies.

It was commonplace in the nineteenth century to rationalize and advocate close links between trade policies, protection, and international laws regarding intellectual property. These links were evident at the most general philosophical level, and at the most specific, especially in terms of compulsory working requirements and provisions to allow imports by the patentee. For instance, the 1880 Paris Convention considered the question of imports of the patented product by the patentee. According to the laws of France, Mexico and Tunisia, such importation would result in the repeal of the patent grant. The Convention inserted an article that explicitly ruled out forfeiture of the patent under these circumstances, which led some French commentators to argue that “the laws on industrial property… will be truly disastrous if they do not have a counterweight in tariff legislation.” The movement to create an international patent system elucidated the fact that intellectual property laws do not exist in a vacuum, but are part of a bundle of rights that are affected by other laws and policies.

Conclusion

Appropriate institutions to promote creations in the material and intellectual sphere are especially critical because ideas and information are public goods that are characterized by nonrivalry and nonexclusion. Once the initial costs are incurred, ideas can be reproduced at zero marginal cost and it may be difficult to exclude others from their use. Thus, in a competitive market, public goods may suffer from underprovision or may never be created because of a lack of incentive on the part of the original provider who bears the initial costs but may not be able to appropriate the benefits. Market failure can be ameliorated in several ways, for instance through government provision, rewards or subsidies to original creators, private patronage, and through the creation of intellectual property rights.

Patents allow the initial producers a limited period during which they are able to benefit from a right of exclusion. If creativity is a function of expected profits, these grants to inventors have the potential to increase social production possibilities at lower cost. Disclosure requirements promote diffusion, and the expiration of the temporary monopoly right ultimately adds to the public domain. Overall welfare is enhanced if the social benefits of diffusion outweigh the deadweight and social costs of temporary exclusion. This period of exclusion may be costly for society, especially if future improvements are deterred, and if rent-seeking such as redistributive litigation results in wasted resources. Much attention has also been accorded to theoretical features of the optimal system, including the breadth, longevity, and height of patent and copyright grants.

However, strongly enforced rights do not always benefit the producers and owners of intellectual property rights, especially if there is a prospect of cumulative invention where follow-on inventors build on the first discovery. Thus, more nuanced models are ambivalent about the net welfare benefits of strong exclusive rights to inventions. Indeed, network models imply that the social welfare of even producers may increase from weak enforcement if more extensive use of the product increases the value to all users. Under these circumstances, the patent owner may benefit from the positive externalities created by piracy. In the absence of royalties, producers may appropriate returns through ancillary means, such as the sale of complementary items or improved reputation. In a variant of the durable-goods monopoly problem, it has been shown that piracy can theoretically increase the demand for products by ensuring that producers can credibly commit to uniform prices over time. Also in this vein, price and/or quality discrimination of non-private goods across pirates and legitimate users can result in net welfare benefits for society and for the individual firm. If the cost of imitation increases with quality, infringement can also benefit society if it causes firms to adopt a strategy of producing higher quality commodities.

Economic theorists who are troubled by the imperfections of intellectual property grants have proposed alternative mechanisms that lead to more satisfactory mathematical solutions. Theoretical analyses have advanced our understanding in this area, but such models by their nature cannot capture many complexities. They tend to overlook such factors as the potential for greater corruption or arbitrariness in the administration of alternatives to patents. Similarly, they fail to appreciate the role of private property rights in conveying information and facilitating markets, and their value in reducing risk and uncertainty for independent inventors with few private resources. The analysis becomes even less satisfactory when producers belong to different countries than consumers. Thus, despite the flurry of academic research on the economics of intellectual property, we have not progressed far beyond Fritz Machlup’s declaration that our state of knowledge does not allow to us to either recommend the introduction or the removal of such systems. Existing studies leave a wide area of ambiguity about the causes and consequences of institutional structures in general, and their evolution across time and region.

In the realm of intellectual property, questions from four centuries ago are still current, ranging from its philosophical underpinnings, to whether patents and copyrights constitute optimal policies towards intellectual inventions, to the growing concerns of international political economy. A number of scholars are so impressed with technological advances in the twenty-first century that they argue we have reached a critical juncture where we need completely new institutions. Throughout their history, patent and copyright regimes have confronted and accommodated technological innovations that were no less significant and contentious for their time. An economist from the nineteenth century would have been equally familiar with considerations about whether uniformity in intellectual property rights across countries harmed or benefited global welfare, and whether piracy might be to the advantage of developing countries. Similarly, the link between trade and intellectual property rights that informs the TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) agreement was quite standard two centuries ago.

Today the majority of patents are filed in developed countries by the residents of developed countries, most notably those of Japan and the United States. The developing countries of the twenty-first century are under significant political pressure to adopt stronger patent laws and enforcement, even though few patents are filed by residents of the developing countries. Critics of intellectual property rights point to costs, such as monopoly rents and higher barriers to entry, administrative costs, outflows of royalty payments to foreign entities, and a lack of indigenous innovation. Other studies, however, have more optimistic findings regarding the role of patents in economic and social development. They suggest that stronger protection can encourage more foreign direct investment, greater access to technology, and increased benefits from trade openness. Moreover, both economic history and modern empirical research indicate that stronger patent rights and more effective markets in invention can, by encouraging and enabling the inventiveness of ordinary citizens of developing countries, help to increase social and economic welfare.

Additional Reading

Khan, B. Zorina. The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Khan, B. Zorina, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff. “Institutions and Technological Innovation during Early Economic Growth, 1790-1930.” NBER Working Paper No. 10966. Cambridge, MA: December 2004. (Available at www.nber.org.)

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Carl Mosk, University of Victoria

Japan achieved sustained growth in per capita income between the 1880s and 1970 through industrialization. Moving along an income growth trajectory through expansion of manufacturing is hardly unique. Indeed Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States all attained high levels of income per capita by shifting from agrarian-based production to manufacturing and technologically sophisticated service sector activity.

Still, there are four distinctive features of Japan’s development through industrialization that merit discussion:

The proto-industrial base

Japan’s agricultural productivity was high enough to sustain substantial craft (proto-industrial) production in both rural and urban areas of the country prior to industrialization.

Investment-led growth

Domestic investment in industry and infrastructure was the driving force behind growth in Japanese output. Both private and public sectors invested in infrastructure, national and local governments serving as coordinating agents for infrastructure build-up.

• Investment in manufacturing capacity was largely left to the private sector.
• Rising domestic savings made increasing capital accumulation possible.
• Japanese growth was investment-led, not export-led.

Total factor productivity growth — achieving more output per unit of input — was rapid.

On the supply side, total factor productivity growth was extremely important. Scale economies — the reduction in per unit costs due to increased levels of output — contributed to total factor productivity growth. Scale economies existed due to geographic concentration, to growth of the national economy, and to growth in the output of individual companies. In addition, companies moved down the “learning curve,” reducing unit costs as their cumulative output rose and demand for their product soared.

The social capacity for importing and adapting foreign technology improved and this contributed to total factor productivity growth:

• At the household level, investing in education of children improved social capability.
• At the firm level, creating internalized labor markets that bound firms to workers and workers to firms, thereby giving workers a strong incentive to flexibly adapt to new technology, improved social capability.
• At the government level, industrial policy that reduced the cost to private firms of securing foreign technology enhanced social capacity.

Shifting out of low-productivity agriculture into high productivity manufacturing, mining, and construction contributed to total factor productivity growth.

Dualism

Sharply segmented labor and capital markets emerged in Japan after the 1910s. The capital intensive sector enjoying high ratios of capital to labor paid relatively high wages, and the labor intensive sector paid relatively low wages.

Dualism contributed to income inequality and therefore to domestic social unrest. After 1945 a series of public policy reforms addressed inequality and erased much of the social bitterness around dualism that ravaged Japan prior to World War II.

The remainder of this article will expand on a number of the themes mentioned above. The appendix reviews quantitative evidence concerning these points. The conclusion of the article lists references that provide a wealth of detailed evidence supporting the points above, which this article can only begin to explore.

The Legacy of Autarky and the Proto-Industrial Economy: Achievements of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868)

Why Japan?

Given the relatively poor record of countries outside the European cultural area — few achieving the kind of “catch-up” growth Japan managed between 1880 and 1970 – the question naturally arises: why Japan? After all, when the United States forcibly “opened Japan” in the 1850s and Japan was forced to cede extra-territorial rights to a number of Western nations as had China earlier in the 1840s, many Westerners and Japanese alike thought Japan’s prospects seemed dim indeed.

Tokugawa achievements: urbanization, road networks, rice cultivation, craft production

In answering this question, Mosk (2001), Minami (1994) and Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973) emphasize the achievements of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868) during a long period of “closed country” autarky between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1850s: a high level of urbanization; well developed road networks; the channeling of river water flow with embankments and the extensive elaboration of irrigation ditches that supported and encouraged the refinement of rice cultivation based upon improving 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 cities like Osaka and Edo (now called Tokyo) and its diffusion to rural areas after 1700; and the promotion of education and population control among both the military elite (the samurai) and the well-to-do peasantry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Tokugawa political economy: daimyo and shogun

These developments were inseparable from the political economy of Japan. The system of confederation government introduced at the end of the fifteenth century placed certain powers in the hands of feudal warlords, daimyo, and certain powers in the hands of the shogun, the most powerful of the warlords. Each daimyo — and the shogun — was assigned a geographic region, a domain, being given taxation authority 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 other countries in an effort to overthrow the central government. The samurai military retainers of the daimyo were forced to abandon rice farming and reside in the castle town headquarters of their daimyo overlord. In exchange, samurai received rice stipends from the rice taxes collected from the villages of their domain. By removing samurai 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 extended 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 widespread diffusion to villages after 1700 was also 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 pride of place to these “domestic sources” of Japan’s future industrial success.

Readiness to emulate the West

As 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 energy production, first and foremost enlisting inorganic energy sources like coal and the other fossil fuels to generate steam power. Having intensively developed the organic economy depending upon natural energy flows like wind, water and fire, Japanese were quite prepared to master inorganic production after the Black Ships of the Americans forced Japan to jettison its long-standing autarky.

From Balanced to Dualistic Growth, 1887-1938: Infrastructure and Manufacturing Expand

Fukoku Kyohei

After the Tokugawa government collapsed in 1868, a new Meiji government committed to the twin 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 built 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 Japanese empire in Asia and the Pacific.

Central government reforms in education, finance and transportation

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 knowledge. The Ministry of Finance created the Bank of Japan in 1882, laying the foundations for a private banking system backed up a lender of last resort. The government began building a steam railroad trunk line girding the four major islands, encouraging 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, investing heavily in integrated spinning and weaving steam-driven textile mills during the 1880s.

Diffusion of best-practice agriculture

At the same time, the abolition of the three hundred or so feudal fiefs that were the backbone of confederation style-Tokugawa rule and their consolidation into politically weak prefectures, under a strong national government that virtually monopolized taxation authority, gave a strong push to the diffusion of best practice agricultural 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 using traditional Japanese technology agriculture and manufacturing using imported Western technology resulted.

Balanced growth

Growth 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 labor — especially young girls recruited out of farm households to labor in the steam using textile mills — flowed back and forth between rural and urban Japan at wages that were roughly equal in industrial and agricultural pursuits.

Geographic economies of scale in the Tokaido belt

Concentration of industrial production first in Osaka and subsequently throughout the Tokaido belt fostered powerful geographic scale economies (the ability to reduce per unit costs as output levels increase), reducing the costs of securing energy, raw materials and access to global markets for enterprises located in the great 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 scale in the nascent industrial belt facing outward onto the Pacific. The consolidation of two huge hydroelectric power grids during the 1920s — one servicing Tokyo/Yokohama, the other Osaka and Kobe — further solidified the comparative advantage of the Tokaido industrial belt in factory production. Finally, the widening and paving during the 1920s of roads that could handle buses and trucks was also pioneered by the great metropolises of the Tokaido, which further bolstered their relative advantage in per capita infrastructure.

Organizational economies of scale — zaibatsu

In addition to geographic scale economies, organizational scale economies also became increasingly important in the late nineteenth centuries. The formation 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 highly diversified combines, binding together enterprises in banking and insurance, trading companies, mining concerns, textiles, iron 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, trade and manufacturing, drastically reducing information-gathering and transactions costs. By attracting relatively scare managerial and entrepreneurial talent, the zaibatsu format economized on human resources.

Electrification

The 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 simultaneously driving a large number of machines — power looms and mules in a spinning/weaving plant for instance – throughout a factory. Small enterprises did not mechanize in the steam era. But with electrification the “unit drive” system of mechanization spread. Each machine could be powered up independently of one another. Mechanization spread rapidly to the smallest factory.

Emergence of the dualistic economy

With the drive into heavy industries — chemicals, iron and steel, machinery — the demand for skilled labor that would flexibly respond to rapid changes in technique soared. Large firms in these industries began offering premium wages and guarantees of employment in good times and bad as a way of motivating and holding onto valuable 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 welfare 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 hinterland.

Clashing urban/rural and landlord/tenant interests

The economic strains of emergent dualism were amplified by the slowing down of technological progress in the agricultural sector, which had exhaustively reaped the benefits due to regional diffusion from the Southwest to the Northeast of best practice Tokugawa 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 role in promoting the diffusion of traditional best practice techniques now lost interest in rural affairs and turned their attention to industrial activities. Tenants 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 imperial rule in 1910 upon the heels of its successful war against 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 throughout the 1930s, calls for land reform and bureaucratic proposals for reform being rejected by a Diet (Japan’s legislature) politically dominated by landlords.

Japan’s military expansion

Japan’s thrust to imperial expansion was inflamed by the growing instability of the geopolitical and international trade regime of the later 1920s and early 1930s. The relative decline of the United Kingdom as an economic power doomed a gold standard regime tied to the British pound. The United States was becoming a potential contender to the United Kingdom as the backer of a gold standard regime but its long history 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 democracy 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 world slipped into global warfare in 1939.

Reform and Reconstruction 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, Japan’s economy and infrastructure was revamped under the S.C.A.P (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) Occupation lasting through 1951. As Nakamura (1995) points out, a variety of Occupation-sponsored reforms transformed 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 stock 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 Peace Preservation Act that was used to suppress union organizing during the interwar period, was given the imprimatur of constitutional legality. Finally, education was opened up, partly through making middle school compulsory, partly through the creation of national universities in each of Japan’s forty-six prefectures.

Improvement in the social capability for economic growth

In 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 tension between rural and urban Japan through land reform and the establishment of a rice price support program — that guaranteed farmers incomes comparable to blue collar industrial workers — also contributed to the social capacity to absorb 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 order

The 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 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 multilateral 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 Trade (the predecessor to the World Trade Organization). Under the logic of building military alliances to contain Eurasian Communism, the United States brought Japan under its “nuclear umbrella” with a bilateral security treaty. American companies were encouraged to license technology to Japanese companies in the new international environment. Japan redirected its trade away from the areas that had been incorporated into the Japanese Empire before 1945, and towards the huge and expanding American market.

Miracle Growth: Soaring Domestic Investment and Export Growth, 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 Growth” between 1953 and the early 1970s whose sources have been cogently analyzed by Denison and Chung (1976). Especially striking in the Miracle Growth period was the remarkable increase in the rate of domestic fixed capital formation, the rise 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

There 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 International Trade and Industry (M.I.T.I.) that took responsibility for overseeing industrial policy is also viewed as facilitating Japan’s 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 entry 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 Japanese 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 Development 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 highly 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 pursued to revolutionize assembly line industries during the 1950s and 1960s.

Ultimate causes of the Japanese economic “miracle”

Miracle 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 importation and adaptation of foreign technology, and the creation of scale economies, which took decades and decades to realize. 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 accounting, 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 Japan’s Modern Economic Development

One of the attractions of studying Japan’s post-1880 economic development is the abundance of quantitative data documenting Japan’s 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 Japan’s long-run growth from relative poverty to abundance is possible.

The remainder of this appendix is devoted to introducing the reader to the vast literature on quantitative analysis of Japan’s 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 importance 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 Japan’s 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 combined (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 capital’s 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 approximate 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 Japan’s 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 Japan’s 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 assumptions and techniques they use can be criticized. The precise numerical results they arrive at can be argued over. Still, their general point — that Japan’s growth was the result of improvements in the quality of factor inputs — health 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.

With this in mind consider Table 1.

Table 1: Industrialization and Economic Growth in Japan, 1880-1970:
Selected Quantitative Characteristics

Panel A: Income and Structure of National Output

Panel B: Domestic and External Sources of Aggregate Supply and Demand Growth: Manufacturing and Mining (Ma), Gross Domestic Fixed Capital Formation (GDFCF), and Trade (TR)

Panel C: Infrastructure and Human Development

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) plus 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 Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.). The trade figures include trade with Japan’s empire (Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, etc.); the income figures for Japan exclude income generated in the empire.

[d] The Human Development Index 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 infant 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), and Ohkawa (1979).

Flowing from this table are a number of points that bear lessons of the Denison and Chung (1976) decomposition. One cluster of points bears upon the timing of Japan’s 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 significance 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 Japan’s income per capita growth. Notable in Panels 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 aggregate demand expansion. The periods of especially intense capital formation were also the periods when manufacturing production soared. Capital formation in manufacturing, or in infrastructure supporting 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 in 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 Japan’s most rapid spurt of economic growth. Table 1 suggests that labor quality improved because health was enhanced and educational 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.

References

Denison, Edward and William Chung. “Economic Growth and Its Sources.” In Asia’s Next Giant: How the Japanese Economy Works, edited by Hugh Patrick and Henry Rosovsky, 63-151. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1976.

Horioka, Charles Y. “Future Trends in Japan’s Savings Rate and the Implications Thereof for Japan’s External Imbalance.” Japan and the World Economy 3 (1991): 307-330.

Japan Statistical Association. Historical 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. New 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. “Production 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 University Press, 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.