ABSTRACT
Although this chapter is mainly concerned with the international contributions by Japanese theoretical economists in the post-World War II period (after 1945), in this section, we shall briefly refer to some important contributions before 1945. Until the end of World War II, Japan was a pure importer of economic theory and had nothing to export except only a few exceptional contributions.1 Kei Shibata and Masazo Sono are two such exceptional Japanese scholars who were able to add something new to modern economic theory of that period. Shibata was a very creative theoretical economist at Kyoto University. He studied mathematical Walrasian/Casselian general equilibrium theory as well as Marxian economic theory. In 1930, he found that Cassel’s (1918) system of equations of general economic equilibrium may not have a meaningful solution because there is the possibility that a subsystem becomes overdeterminate. Unfortunately, his paper (Shibata 1930) was written in Japanese, so that his contribution remained unknown amongst western economists. But his assertion was in fact the same as that of von Stackelberg (1933), which appeared three years after the publication of Shibata (1930).2 Shibata (1933), which was written in English, tried to formulate Marx’s scheme of reproduction by means of a simplified two sector Walrasian general equilibrium system of equations, and this paper was referred to by Oscar Lange (1935). He also published a critical review of Keynes’ General Theory (Keynes 1936) in English only a year after the publication of Keynes’ book (cf. Shibata 1937). Masazo Sono was a mathematician rather than economist, but his mathematical analysis of the ‘separable goods’ problem, which was done during World War II, is an important contribution to consumer theory (cf. Sono 1943).3 The contributions by such economists as Shibata and Sono were the pioneering works which foreshowed the striking international contributions by several Japanese theoretical economists after World War II, especially in the period between the 1940s and the 1970s. In the following sections, we shall consider international contributions by Japanese economists to the development of economic theory after World War II, especially focusing on the development of dynamic economic theories from the
1940s to the 1970s. We take up the theoretical contributions by Takuma Yasui, Michio Morishima, Hirofumi Uzawa, Takashi Negishi, Nobuo Okishio and Hukukane Nikaido.4
