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Harbin, located in Northeast China, is the provincial capital of Heilongjiang province, the People’s Republic of China. The city was one of the most crucial junction cities on the Chinese Eastern Railway built in the early 1900s, which connected Russia and China. Russian migrants had a significant impact on the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation of Harbin and Russian features can be identified from Harbin’s urban planning, which is unique to other major Chinese cities. However, there is limited research on Russian influence on Harbin’s urban development during the Russian colonial period from 1898 to 1931, which is the focus of this paper. Field observation, map analysis, and desktop research were conducted to collect qualitative data. This study addresses the importance of Russian colonial impact on Harbin’s urban planning and the heritage conservation of the city’s historical urban fabric. Findings of this research can help researchers and local authorities understand the uniqueness and value of Russian inspired city planning. It will also be beneficial to the development of appropriate conservation guidelines which are applicable to Harbin and to other Chinese cities previously under colonial influence.

PurposeEconomic theories on structural change focus on factors such as fluctuations in relative prices and income growth. In addition, China’s reform and opening up has also been accompanied by increasing openness, significant fluctuations in investment rates, and frictions in the labor market. Existing literature lacks a unified theoretical framework to assess the relative importance of all these determinants. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachTo incorporate all of the potential determinants of China’s structural change, the authors build a two-country four-sector neoclassical growth model that embeds the multi-sector Eaton and Kortum (2002) model of international trade, complete input-output structure, non-homothetic preference and labor market frictions. The authors decompose the sectoral employment shares into six effects: the Baumol, Engel, investment, international trade, factor intensity and labor market friction effects. Using the data of Chinese economy from 1978 to 2011, the authors perform a quantitative investigation of the six determinants’ effects through the decomposition approach and counterfactual exercises.FindingsLow-income elasticity of demand, high labor intensity, and the existence of the switching costs are the reasons for the high employment share in the agricultural sector. Technological progress, investment and international trade have comparatively less influence on the proportion difference of employment in the three sectors.Originality/valueTherefore, to examine the impact on China’s structural change, in addition to Baumol effect and the Engel effect, it is also necessary to consider the impact of three more factors: international trade, investment and switching costs. Therefore, the authors decompose the factors that may influence China’s structural change into the Baumol, Engel, investment, international trade, factor intensity effect and switching cost effects. The authors evaluate these six effects using the decomposition approach and counterfactual exercises.

To what degree were Chinese financial markets integrated with the rest of the world prior to the 1949 Revolution and to what extent was the Chinese foreign exchange market efficient during this period? We estimate silver points for the Shanghai market from 1905 to 1933 to answer these questions. Our inferred measures are small in value, favorably match measured costs of the silver trade derived from contemporary accounts, and fare well in the comparison to estimates of trans-Atlantic gold points. This leads to the conclusion that the degree of Chinese financial market integration was substantial. However, during and immediately after World War I, our estimates of the silver points increased appreciably, foreshadowing the collapse of China's linkages to world financial markets beginning in the 1930s.

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 terms to the end of our period.

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combining county-level data on Protestant presence in 1920 and socioeconomic indicators in 2000, we find that the spread of Protestantism has generated significant positive effects in long-term economic growth, educational development, and health care outcomes. To better understand whether the relationship is causal, we exploit the fact that missionaries purposefully undertook disaster relief work to gain the trust of the local people. Thus, we use the frequency of historical disasters as an instrument for Protestant distribution. Our IV results confirm and enhance our OLS results. When we further investigate the transmission channels over the long historical period between 1920 and 2000, we find that although improvements in education and health care outcomes account for a sizable portion of the total effects of missionaries’ past activities on today’s economic outcomes, Protestant activities may have also contributed to long-term economic growth through other channels, such as through transformed social values. If so, then a significant amount of China’s growth since 1978 is the result not just of sudden institutional changes but of human capital and social values acquired over a longer historical period.

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them.

This paper examines the state and scope of the study of economic history of developing regions, underlining the importance of knowledge of history for economic development. While the quality of the existing research on developing countries is impressive, the proportion of published research focusing on these regions is low. The dominance of economic history research on the North American and Western European success stories suggests the need for a forum for future research that contributes to our understanding of how institutions, path dependency, technological change and evolutionary processes shape economic growth in the developing parts of the world. Many valuable data sets and historical episodes relating to developing regions remain unexplored, and many interesting questions unanswered. This is exciting. Economic historians and other academics interested in the economic past have an opportunity to work to begin to unlock the complex reasons for differences in development, the factors behind economic disasters and the dynamics driving emerging success stories.