TY - JOUR
AU - Ranis, Gustav
AB - BOOK REVIEWS ' | 3 5 3 Agricultura l Production and the Economic Development of Japan, 1873-192 2 by James I. Nakamura. Princeton, Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1966.—xxiii, 256 pp. $7.50. Mr. Nakamura sets himself two major objectives in this volume: first, to throw doubt on the official statistics concerning Japanese agricultural production in the Meiji period and to put forward alternative estimates of his own and second, to throw doubt on the, by now, conventional as- sessment of the Japanese success story of development and to propose an alternative interpretation. On the data side Nakamura advances two basic propositions: that the original official agricultural output data were un- derstated by as much as 30 per cent mainly due to the desire to evade the land tax based on the initial cadastral survey of the late 1870's ; second, that the extent of under-reporting declined with time as the fear of a fol- low-up reassessment faded and inflation eroded the real incidence of the tax. Moreover, while others, including Ohkawa (Kazushi Ohkawa et al., The Growth Rate of the Japanese Economy Since 1878 [Tokyo, 1957] ) and Lockwood (William W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan [Princeton, 1954] ) 
TI - Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of Japan, 1873-1922, by James I. Nakamura
JO - Political Science Quarterly
DO - 10.2307/2146983
DA - 1970-06-15
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/agricultural-production-and-the-economic-development-of-japan-1873-4l7HymmJZ2
SP - 343
EP - 345
VL - 85
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -