Search

We employ a new, commodity-level dataset on the flow of goods between fifteen major treaty ports to estimate a general-equilibrium trade model for China in the late Qing era. The distribution of welfare effects depends critically on each port's productivity, China's economic geography as it influences trade costs, as well as the degree of regional diversity in production, which increases the potential gains from trade. We utilize this framework to quantify the size and distribution of welfare effects resulting from new technology and lower trade costs that emerged during the Treaty-Port Era. Our results suggest that the new trade with foreign countries led to significant changes in domestic trade relationships. There was a limit to how much could be gained through increased domestic trade, however, because differences in productivity across regions were relatively low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a quantitative history of the homicide rate in Qing China and investigates its social and economic drivers. Estimates based on historical archives indicate that this annual rate ranged between 0.35 and 1.47 per 100,000 inhabitants during the 1661–1898 period, a low level unmatched by Western Europe until the late 19th century. China's homicide rate rose steadily from 1661 to 1821 but declined gradually thereafter until the turn of the century. Although extreme, homicide represents a random sampling of the entire distribution of interpersonal violence; hence the homicide rate serves as a proxy for overall violence, and its rise implies a decline in personal security. We use national and cross-provincial panel data to show that population density, state capacity, local self-governance, interregional grain market integration, and grain price level (which captures crop failure and other survival distress) are all statistically significant drivers of the homicide rate in 18th- and 19th-century China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the Qing Dynasty ( 1644-1840), a long period without major wars, political turmoil, or significant institutional change in the Chinese capital. We use hedonic methods to construct a real estate price index for Beijing for the period. The regression analysis explains a major proportion of the variance of housing prices. We find that house prices grew steadily for the first half-century of the Qing Dynasty and declined afterwards in both nominal and real terms through the late eighteenth century. Nominal prices grew starting in the late eighteenth century and declined from the early nineteenth century through 1840. But these price changes occurred with contemporaneous price changes in basic measures of the cost of living: there was little change in real tenns to the end of our period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]