Understanding and Sharing Asian Economic History :
On the Significance of the Asian Statistics
Database Project
by
Konosuke Odaka
Introduction
In the fiscal year 1995, an academic project was launched at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, with the financial support of the grant-in-aid program for scientific research administered by the Ministry of Education and Sciences, government of Japan. It is officially entitled as "The compilation of long-term economic statistics (or LTES for short) of the trans-Asian region."(1)
In the present essay, I wish to outline the main conceptual framework of the project, which I shall abbreviate as ASHSTAT to stand for Asian Historical Statistics Project, followed by possible applications of the proposed outcomes of the proiect.
The Objectives and Methods
The ultimate aim of the project is to estimate, construct, and compile sets of macro economic, historical statistics for the greater Asia, which meet the following two conditions, i.e. that (1) each component of the series in a given regional subgroup (a country, in most cases) remains consistent with other components within the subgroup ("internal" consistency), and that (2) the regional series are comparable across time and space ("external" consistency). Efforts are being made to start the series as far back as the mid nineteenth century and to complete them through 1990. In principle, the work will be confined to the compilation of annual time series for the very simple reason that it is the only practical method for compiling historical data covering a large variety of nations over such an extensive time period.
In order to satisfy the "internal" consistency condition of historical
