Estimating the shares of secondary- and tertiary-sector outputs in the age of early modern growth: the case of Japan, 1600-1874

摘要

This paper proposes a new methodology of estimating non-primary sector output shares in early modern growth. By using data from proto-industrial Japan, the paper demonstrates, first, that not just the rate of urbanisation but population density would also work as another predictor of the secondary- and tertiary-sectoral shares when growth was rural-centred; and second, that regional panel data should be constructed from earliest possible sets of modern data to estimate the coefficients of these two variables on the sectoral shares. In order to apply the coefficients derived from modern data for the calculation of pre-modern estimates, regional panel data are far superior to simple time-series statistics. The paper presents new estimates of sectoral shares and the corresponding set of per capita gross domestic product thus computed for Japan 1600-1846, with a few comments on the prior estimates by Angus Maddison.