Business Cycles, Climate Anomalies, and Regional Height Cycles in Japan, 1892-1937 Jean-Pascal Bassino a and Ulrich Woitek B
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Business Cycles, Climate Anomalies, and Regional Height Cycles in Japan, 1892-1937 Jean-Pascal Bassino a and Ulrich Woitek b This version: April 2012 Please do not circulate a IAO, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 15 Parvis René Descartes, BP 7000, 69342 Lyon Cedex, France (corresponding author). b Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zürichbergstrasse 14 8032 Zurich, Switzerland. Business Cycles, Climate Anomalies, and Regional Height Cycles in Japan, 1892-1937 Abstract Recent research has shown that there is a significant inter-relation between business cycles and height cycles. We analyze patterns in average stature of Japanese conscripts for the period 1892-1937 using regional level annual time series (47 prefectures). Cycles in the 3-5 years range dominate; this is similar to findings for the US and Europe. Human stature in prefectures characterized by product specialization seems to be more sensitive to the dominant business cycle in the 7-10 years range than in others. We find that also that regional summer temperature contributes significantly to the explanation of the height cycle. Keywords: Business cycles, human stature, height cycles, climate, Japan, spectral analysis 1. Introduction Most studies analyzing the relation between economic and anthropometric variables point toward a significant and positive relationship between income and stature. It has been well established that long-term trends in average stature in a given population are influenced by changes in economic conditions measured by income; the major explanation is the link between income and nutritional status. Quantitative analyses using international or inter- regional cross-section data highlight the role of other explanatory variables such as availability of health services, urbanisation, and workload of children and pregnant women (Steckel 1995, 2009). Recent research has also shown that there is a significant inter-relation between business cycles, measured by macroeconomic indicators of income, output, or investment, and cycles in human stature (Woitek 2003, Sunder and Woitek 2005).1 These results indicate that short- term variations in economic bell being can have a discernible impact on height. By focusing on deviations from the secular trend, we can study the relation between income and in stature without having to take into consideration explanatory variables such as urbanization, workload, and the provision of health services that tend to evolve at a relatively slow pace. In this paper, we add to the existing knowledge by analyzing height cycles observed on Japanese regional level annual series of average height of conscripts measured between 1892 and 1937 (47 prefectures). In order to relate short-term variations in income to height cycles, we have to identify the period(s) of the life during which the growth of stature is particularly sensitive to economic conditions. The height of an adult reflects the cumulated influences of nutritional status, health conditions, and other environmental variables at different ages, from gestation to early adulthood. For any individual, the potential growth in stature between conception and early adulthood is essentially determined by two factors: genes, and the height of the mother, which constrains the growth of the foetus in utero (Cole 2003). But depending on environmental conditions, a certain percentage of the population will become shorter than the potential level. A sharp degradation in living conditions during infancy and adolescence can result in a slowdown or complete halt of height growth. When the effect is of short duration and moderate intensity, an almost complete recovery is possible the following months or years. 1 These fluctuations in human stature are not harmonic waves with fixed frequency and amplitude, but akin to economic fluctuations that are commonly describe as business cycles. It is therefore acceptable to describe these phenomena as height cycles. However, depending on their severity and duration, adverse conditions could have an irreversible impact. The age at which these events occur is of critical importance: adult final stature is particularly influenced by conditions during gestation and early infancy (ibid.). A sudden decline in disposable income can be expected to induce a decline in the nutritional status of a large share of the population, particularly if the initial level is only slightly above subsistence level. Hence, height cycles observed on series of average stature reported for successive annual cohorts reflect to a large extent the impact of changes in income that occurred during the year of birth. Therefore, average height of individuals aged 20 measured in 1892-1937 can be related to living condition during the period 1872-1917. A major difficulty encountered in the analysis of height cycles is that changes in living conditions are influenced by nation-wide economic conditions, but also by asymmetric shocks taking place at the regional level. Yearly variations of income levels are the manifestation of national business cycles that are essentially related to phases of expansion and recession of industrial production and investment2. In the meantime, local climate anomalies can result in severe crop failures (or exceptional bumper crops), drastically depressing (or strongly increasing) agricultural income3. Hence, height cycles reflect the combined impacts of business cycles in the industrial and financial sectors, and asymmetric shocks on agricultural output. The motivation for using Japanese data in an investigation of the impact of business cycles and regional climate anomalies on height cycles is related to several attractive features of this country for a case study. First, income levels were low by international standards; nutritional status, almost no import of foodstuffs before 1918. Second, as the first non-western industrial nation4; business cycles can be easily identified. Third, we can rely on anthropometric data of an exceptional quality. Fourth, detailed climate data are available for a large sample of prefectures using regional level data is twofold. First, we can expect the results based on these data to be more robust than those obtained by relying on national-level averages, or average for different population sample. Second, and more importantly, using regional-level data allows us to investigate the relation between stochastic shocks originating from exogenous variables (i.e. variables that are not determined by the economic dynamics) and variation in stature. Climate is the most obvious purely exogenous variable and it is 2 The role of monetary variable and linkage with the economic conditions in the rest of the world are discussed in section 2. 3 Market integration; price levels. note: also, in case of imperfect market integration, locally available food supply, or purchasing power; Diseases 4 Equally important is the fact that Japan has been subject to unequal treaties, between 1858 and 1911, and therefore influenced by business cycles in the rest of the world. particularly suitable for our study as it impacts on both economic and biological welfare, particularly in lower income countries. Climate anomalies in rainfall and temperatures (as well as wind) are key determinants in short-term variations in agricultural output volume and therefore influence food supply and agricultural income, which in turn could be expect to explain a large share in short-term deviations in the secular trend in stature. Moreover, as some climate anomalies are mostly regional in their occurrence, resulting in asymmetric shocks that could be expected to exert a strongly negative impact on local economic conditions, we should be able to disentangle two determinants of short-term deviations in the secular trend of stature: on the one hand, the influence of macro-economic variables reflecting the dynamics of the national economy as a whole; on the other hand, the impact of variations in local agricultural income and food supply resulting from regional-level climate anomalies. 5 As the dynamics of both economic and anthropometric variables can be decomposed as a combination of a long-term trend (either linear or non-linear) and of short terms fluctuations (that can be cyclical, i.e. more or less stable in terms of period and magnitude) we can detrend economic and stature series in order to investigate the influence of changes in economic conditions on stature. In addition to the cross-section correlation between levels of income and stature, a positive and significant relation is observed in interwar Japan, using also cross- section regional level data, between short or medium term variation in income (5 or 10 years) and the lagged variation in stature, without any influence of health variables (Bassino 2006). The remaining of the paper is organized into 5 sections. Section 2 considers the impact of exogenous shocks and endogenous economic variables on stature; section 3 presents the data available and offers a summarized view of business cycles in pre-WWII Japan; section 3 describes the method used for analyzing cycles in stature; section 4 presents the results and analyzes the influence of economic fluctuations and climate anomalies; section 5 concludes. 2. Endogenous cycles and exogenous shocks Although the purpose of this paper is not to revisit business cycles theory, it is worth considering the implications of the availability of two clearly distinct and largely independent 5 Health conditions prévalence of pathologies. Lack of information.