A European political-economic space that embraced Japan: the international context of the conventional-tariff network,ca.1892–1914

This article sheds new light on the economic globalization in Europe and Asia from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with a special focus on the role of bilateral commercial treaties and import tariffs. Countries concluded a number of treaties in those days, and they came to form an extensive ‘conventional-tariff network’. This mechanism contributed to the stabilization of international economic-political space by facilitating reciprocal tariff concessions. The extent of this conventional-tariff network was both temporally and geographically larger than has been assumed. First, as the recent scholarship has shown, the network, which emerged in the 1860s, survived the political turbulence of the 1890s and spanned Central European countries such as Germany and Italy by the early 1910s. Second, the network spread outside Europe and reached East Asia by the 1910s, when Japan renegotiated its commercial treaties and became a new member of the network. The network embodied so strong a mechanism of self-maintenance based on the coordination of economic interests that it was resilient to a major political shock such as the First World War. While the tariff systems in Europe and in East Asia around 1900 have been separately discussed in the literature, this paper focuses on the treaty partnership between these two areas to show how the mechanism of the conventional-tariff network enabled the countries to cooperate for mutual concessions on international trade.     

OLS ESTIMATION AND THE t TEST REVISITED IN RANK‐SIZE RULE REGRESSION*

ABSTRACT The rank‐size rule and Zipf's law for city sizes have been traditionally examined by means of OLS estimation and the t test. This paper studies the accurate and approximate properties of the OLS estimator and obtains the distribution of the t statistic under the assumption of Zipf's law (i.e., Pareto distribution). Indeed, we show that the t statistic explodes asymptotically even under the null, indicating that a mechanical application of the t test yields a serious type I error. To overcome this problem, critical regions of the t test are constructed to test the Zipf's law. Using these corrected critical regions, we can conclude that our results are in favor of the Zipf's law for many more countries than in the previous researches such as Rosen and Resnick (1980) or Soo (2005) . By using the same database as that used in Soo (2005) , we demonstrate that the Zipf law is rejected for only one of 24 countries under our test whereas it is rejected for 23 of 24 countries under the usual t test. We also propose a more efficient estimation procedure and provide empirical applications of the theory for some countries.