Productivity Trend in Korea from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century: A Comment on Jun, Lewis, and Kang

Abstract

In a recent article published in this Journal, Jun Seong Ho, James Lewis, and Kang Han-Rog described the seve teenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth c nturies in the Korean economic history as periods of expansion, stability, and decline, respectively. Without clarifying whether it is the aggregate or per capita output that they claim to have expanded, stabilized, and then declined, the authors further argued that the trend is explicable in terms of productivity, which was in turn attributed primarily to policy measures affecting irrigation, security of property rights, and famine relief.1 Productivity remains a term imprecisely defined in the article. In the article, Jun, Lewis, and Kang spend no time discussing evidence on factor and asset prices. Such data is readily available. In fact, the authors have published such series themselves.2 The evidence on factor and asset prices indicate that the marginal productivity of land and labor declined consistently, rather than expanded, stabilized, and then declined in the precolonial centuries. Jun, Lewis, and Kang inferred productivity trends from the movement in commodity prices. Having claimed that the relative price of cotton cloth declined from the mid eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, they interpreted the alleged decline as an indication of falling productivity in rice farming. Of the eleven observations on the relative price in the two centuries in Figure 1 (on p. 254), the last three appear to have been made after 1876, the year when cotton textile imports from Britain began to depress cotton textile prices in Korea. The remaining eight?five for the eighteenth century and three for the nineteenth century?data points hardly justify the claim of rice having risen vis-a-vis cotton cloth after 1800. Moreover, even if one chooses to believe so, the perception could equally be interpreted as showing faster productivity growth in cotton textile production. The other evidence presented to support the claim of falling productivity is the rise in the rice price in terms of copper coin in the second half of the nineteenth century (figure on p. 255). However, in all likelihood, the inflation from 1876 onward was a consequence of the opening of port in 1876. In the following decades, agricultural exports expanded rapidly, causing not only the rice price, but also prices of dry field products to surge. The figure also shows that the rice price in terms of silver did not start to rise until 1876, which suggests that the rice price inflation in the third quarter