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Multiple Choices: Rural Household Diversification and Japan's Path to Industrialization
Author(s) -
FRANCKS PENELOPE
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
journal of agrarian change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.63
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1471-0366
pISSN - 1471-0358
DOI - 10.1111/j.1471-0366.2005.00108.x
Subject(s) - industrialisation , diversification (marketing strategy) , complementarity (molecular biology) , agriculture , rural area , economic growth , economics , economic geography , agricultural diversification , business , development economics , geography , market economy , political science , marketing , archaeology , biology , law , genetics
Much of the historical literature on the forms of industrialization has assumed that agriculture and industry must develop along separate and specialized lines, linked only at the macro level through inter‐sectoral resource transfers. This paper uses the Japanese historical case, combined with the recognition, in much work on contemporary developing and developed countries, of the significance of diversification as a rural household strategy, to argue that a pattern of industrialization based on micro‐level complementarity between agricultural and non‐agricultural activities is possible. After summarizing the changing characteristics of the diversification pursued by Japanese rural households since the nineteenth century, the paper seeks to demonstrate that technical and organizational change in agriculture and rural industry can be seen as conditioning each other to produce the inter‐connected structure of flexible manufacturing and small‐scale, ‘part‐time’ farming on which the significant role of the rural sector in Japan's economic growth has been based.