International Circumstances Surrounding the Postwar Japanese Cotton Textile Industry

日本棉纺织工业在战前是世界上最大的棉布出口国，但在第二次世界大战期间失去了所有市场，在战后至1960年期间迅速恢复。这项研究使用日文材料和曼彻斯特棉花委员会收集的统计数字和报告，追溯了这一恢复的过程，并试图查明促成这一过程的国际因素。发表在《战后日本棉纺织工业的国际环境》上的主要研究结果如下。在现有文献中，关注的重点是日本、美国和英国之间的关系，而本研究发现，亚洲主要出口国，特别是日本、中国、香港和印度在世界市场上激烈的国际竞争是日本工业快速技术创新和产品质量升级背后最强大的力量。日本的工业政策大力旨在提高该国的工业结构，并旨在促进工业结构调整，这有助于这一进程，而香港通过行使关贸总协定所提倡的自由贸易原则，对加强亚洲内部在国际市场上的竞争作出了重要贡献。然而，这种激烈竞争的更深层次原因来自亚洲和非洲其他发展中国家进口替代工业化的相对迅速的趋势，这迫使亚洲主要出口国在全球范围内相互竞争，包括倾向于保护主义的发达西方市场。1998年11月在台湾举行的一次会议上宣读了题为“1960-1980年世界纺织品贸易中的东亚”的上述报告的一篇，目前正在订正以供出版。

The Japanese cotton textile industry, which had been the world's largest exporter of cotton cloth in the prewar period but had lost all the markets during the Second World War, made a rapid recovery during the period from immediately after the war to 1960. This research traced the process of this recovery with the use of both Japanese-language material and the statistics and reports collected by the Cotton Board in Manchester, and attempted to identify international factors contributing to it. The main findings, published in 'International Circumstances surrounding the Postwar Japanese Cotton Textile Industry", are as follows. In the existing literature, attention has been focussed upon the relationships between Japan, the United States and Britain, while this research found the fierce international competition between major Asian exporters, especially Japan, China, Hong Kong and India in the world market as the most powerful force behind the rapid technological innovation and the upgrading of the quality of products by the Japanese industry. Japanese industrial policy, aimed strongly at the upgrading the country's industrial structure and designed to promote industrial restructuring, helped this process, while Hong Kong, by exercising the principle of free trade advocated by the GATT most literally, made a vital contribution towards the intensification of intra-Asian competition in the international market. A deeper cause for the intensity of this competition, however, came from the relatively swift trend of import-substitution industrialisation in other developing countries in Asia and Africa, which forced the major Asian exporters to compete with one another on a global scale, including the advanced Western markets which tended towards protectionist.A sequence to the above, titled 'East Asia in World Textile Trade, 1960-1980, has been read at a conference in Taiwan in November 1998, which is currently being revised for publication.