The Economics of Printing in Early Modern
China and Europe
Luis Angeles
October 16, 2014
Abstract
This paper o¤ers an economic analysis of the choice of printing
technology - and the resulting outcomes in the book market - in early
modern China and Europe. Despite its technological precociousness,
China adopted xylography over movable type for most of its printing.
Europe, who discovered printing considerably later, only employed
movable type. Europeans also produced far more books than China:
almost 70 European book titles for every Chinese one. I show how
these outcomes are fully compatible with standard economic behaviour and ultimately stem from the di¤erences between the European
and the Chinese script. The analysis uses a model of the book market where all parameters are given quantitative estimates from the
historical literature.
Adam Smith Business School (Economics), University of Glasgow. Gilbert Scott
Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected] . Tel:
+44 141 330 8517. I thank Francesco Caselli and three anonymous referees for in-depth
commentary that led to major changes in the paper. I also thank participants of the several conferences where the paper was presented, and in particular participants of the 4th
Asian Historical Economics Conference in Istanbul, where the amount of knowledgeable
commentary on the paper was as rich as it was rewarding. I am, of course, liable for all
remaining errors.
1
1
Introduction
The advent of printing has long been regarded as a pivotal moment in European history. In the words of Myron Gilmore (1962, p. 186), "It brought
about the most radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life
in the history of western civilization." Printing made existing knowledge far
more accessible than it had been hitherto. If we accept that existing knowledge is the primal input in the production of new knowledge, printing can
be considered one of the main drivers of the revolution in all areas of human
endeavour that Europe was to experience from the 17th century onwards.
Finally, if technological knowledge is the ultimate driver of economic growth,
the invention of printing may be the best historical example - and perhaps
the only one - of a positive exogenous shock on the trajectory of western
economic development.
Recent research in economics corroborates this view. Dittmar (2011)
shows how an early adoption of printing technology is associated with faster
economic growth among European cities. Reverse causality does not seem to
explain the trend as the early adopters of printing had no previous advantage.
Along the same lines, Baten and van Zanden (2008) use country-level data
covering the pre-industrial period to show how book production per capita
during any given 50-year period is a good predictor of economic growth over
the next 50-year period.
Next to the European experience, however, it is insightful to juxtapose the
experience of China - where printing was invented for the …rst time in human
history as much as seven centuries in advance of Europe. While printing
would eventually spread and exert an important in‡uence on China’s cultural
and economic life, nothing as momentous as Europe’s Scienti…c Revolution of
the 17th century or the European Enlightenment of the 18th century ensued.
If printing is as transformative a technology as the European experience leads
us to believe, why did it fail to transform China?
2
A …rst observation is that Europe made use of printing technology to a
far larger degree than China. This can be best appreciated if we compare
the number of book titles produced in each region - a measure of the amount
of knowledge being put in circulation through printed media. For China, we
have two reasonably good estimates for the second half of the Ming dynasty,
a period that saw a rapid development of commercial printing in China’s
largest cities (Chow 2004, Meyer-Fong 2007). The total number of book
titles printed during this period, the years 1522-1644, has been set at 3,300 by
Buringh and van Zanden (2009) and 6,618 by Chia (2003). During this same
period, Western Europe produced a total of 457,500 book titles according to
the careful research work of Buringh and van Zanden (2009). Given that both
regions had a comparable total population and similar levels of income per
head, the di¤erence is staggering. Even the larger estimate for the Chinese
case, which I will use in what follows, leads to a ratio of 69 European titles
for every Chinese one.1
This large di¤erence cannot be explained away by China’s relative linguistic homogeneity as compared to Europe. Indeed, the estimates for the
number of titles produced in Europe during this time includes translations of
works originally published in another language whereas Chinese publications
were, with some rare exceptions, all in Classical Chinese. A look at the available evidence, however, suggests that translations were a relatively modest
share of European publications - 14.68% of the total for the Netherlands,
the only country for which such detailed information exists.2 This relatively
modest share of translations may be explained by the preeminence of Latin
in European learned societies. The Universal Short Title Catalogue, a pretty
much exhaustive list of all books printed in Europe between Gutenberg and
1
A comparison of total book production is not possible as we lack estimates of print
runs for most book titles over the early modern period, especially for China.
2
Source: Short Title Catalogue for the Netherlands. The …gure of 14.68% refers to the
period 1522-1644. For all books in the catalogue, covering the period 1451-1800, the share
of translations is 11.20%.
3
the year 1600, tells us that about 52% of all titles produced during the …rst
half of the 16th century were in Latin. This percentage falls to 42% during
the second half of the 16th century and keeps falling afterwards, but there is
no denying the importance of Latin throughout the early modern period.
What’s more, the existence of translations should not in‡ate the total
number of European titles with respect to the Chinese case - regardless of
their frequency. This is because, during the early modern period, successful
books typically spread by being reprinted in di¤erent cities - large transportation costs made this option preferable to printing books in a single location
and moving them between cities (Dittmar 2013). The total number of titles reported above counts such reprints as di¤erent titles (and rightly so, as
variations were typically introduced between reprints). Thus, the di¤usion
of a text throughout Europe or China entailed the production of additional
titles; whether some of these titles were translations or not does not a¤ect
the total number of titles produced in the process.
A somewhat more valid concern is that our …gures are formed using current library holdings and thus do not include titles for which copies are no
longer extant. No doubt a certain number of titles have been completely
lost in the four to …ve centuries separating us from the period 1522-1644, so
that the …gures we use should be considered as a lower bound estimate. It
may be possible to argue that China’s rather tormented history over the last
few centuries resulted in a larger loss of books than in Europe - although at
least on the war front this would be a di¢ cult case to make. Even so, the
di¤erence in our baseline estimates is so large that even assuming that half
of all Chinese titles were lost to posterity while none of the European ones
su¤ered such fate still leaves us with a ratio of 35 European titles for every
Chinese one.
A second, equally intriguing di¤erence between European and Chinese
printing refers to the type of technology employed. As documented below,
4
most Chinese books were produced using the technology of block printing
while Westerners used the more advanced technology of movable type. This
is all the more remarkable when we consider that both types of technology
originated in China.
To a long line of historical research on the reasons behind China’s failure
to industrialize ahead of Europe, the above outcomes in the book market are
simply consequences of China’s underlying structural weaknesses. Indeed,
China may have produced less books simply because it produced fewer ideas.
According to this view, the ultimate drivers of China’s economic stagnation
should be sought among aspects such as its cultural stasis and closeness to
the rest of the world (Landes 1997), lack of inter-state competition (Jones
2003), or bad geography (Morris 2010). China’s relative backwardness in
book production would be a re‡ection of these forces, not a prime force
itself.
In this paper I explore a di¤erent route. I o¤er an economic explanation
for the adoption of di¤erent printing technologies in China and Europe which
does not rely on aspects such as culture, geography, or institutions. The reason for doing so is not a belief that China and Europe were similar in any
of these dimensions: they were not, and their comparative study is rightly at
the core of much research in economic history. But this paper attempts to
be economical in its use of underlying hypotheses, avoiding the use of distant
causal factors when more direct and concrete ones are available. My argument is that pro…t maximization guided the choice of printing technology on
both extremes of Eurasia, and the Chinese opted for block printing technology on a rational basis. Block printing was cost e¤ective in China, but not in
Europe, given the di¤erences between the Chinese and the European script.
Furthermore, I incorporate this insight into a model of the book market
where book producers search to satisfy a demand for books by choosing not
only the printing technology they use but also the number of book titles they
5
produce and their price. I simulate this model using parameter values taken
directly from the historical literature, which results in predictions about the
outcomes in the book market. The model is able to explain why China
produced far fewer books than Europe, and its quantitative predictions approximate historical reality remarkably well. In a nutshell, China not being
able to take full advantage of movable type technology meant that the cost of
producing new pages of text - that is, new book titles - was far larger there.
What these di¤erent outcomes meant for economic development in the
long run, and for the Great Divergence between China and the West, is
a subject on which I will not delve for long. The analysis in this paper
suggests that China failed to take full advantage of printing technology for
what may be called a historical accident: China’s script, unlike its Western
counterpart, was poorly adapted for movable type technology. With printing
being commonly regarded as a major breakthrough in the West’s social,
intellectual, and ultimately economic development, it is tempting to conclude
this constituted a severe handicap on China’s developmental path. As it
stands, however, this idea can be no more than informed speculation - I have
no solid empirical evidence to o¤er in its support. The contribution of this
paper is on the economic analysis of printing in early modern times; future
research will determine how this …ts into the bigger picture of divergence
between the Chinese and Western civilizations.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section o¤ers a
historical overview of printing in China and Europe. Section 3 discusses the
di¤erences in the cost of printing between these two regions over the early
modern period. Section 4 incorporates these cost di¤erences into an economic
model of the book market. The next section calibrates the model to early
modern China and Europe and section 6 simulates the model under those
calibrated parameter values. After a comparison of the model’s prediction
with historical data, section 7 o¤ers some concluding remarks.
6
Evolution of printing in China and the West3
2
Throughout pre-industrial times, printing was performed using two alternative technologies: xylography, commonly called block printing, and movable
type. The invention of block printing takes place in China during the 8th
century CE at the latest, quite possibly earlier, and precise details regarding
the inventor and the place of invention are unknown. In block printing characters are carved onto a wooden block, which is then inked with the help of
a brush, and an impression is taken by laying a sheet of paper over it and
rubbing. Blocks could then be stored for future usage. The earliest surviving
books produced by this method date from the late 9th century, and from the
10th century onwards the technology was used on a truly enormous scale for
the printing of the entire canons of Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist scriptures
by the government and religious orders in China. Printing for commercial
purposes was slow to pick up in China, but by the middle of the 16th century
a well-developed book market was in place and most books were printed for
pro…t (Meyer-Fong 2007).
Movable type di¤ers from block printing in that each character is carved
or cast into a separate piece of wood, metal, or other material. The characters
(or "types") are then assembled together into a "form", which is laid on a
tablet and from which impressions can be taken as in block printing. The
form is disassembled after use, and the types are employed in a new page
of text. The invention of movable type is ascribed to a certain Pi Sheng
sometime in the years 1040s. Sheng used ceramic for his types, but we
have no surviving texts or pieces; we know of his invention by the account
of the renowned Chinese polymath Shen Kuo in his Dream Pool Essays of
3
For printing in the West the seminal work would be Febvre and Martin (1976). The
consequences of printing on Western civilization are discussed at length by McLuhan
(1962) and Eisenstein (1979, 1983). For printing in China, a very authoritative text is
Tsien (1985), while detailed discussions of the socioeconomic context of book publishing
can be found in Chow (2004) and McDermott (2006).
7
1088. From that moment and throughout the early modern period China
experimented with di¤erent materials for movable type. Printing technology
spread to countries such as Japan and Korea, the latter of these being an
innovator on its own right with the …rst recorded use of metal in movable
type technology in the year 1236.
Despite this early invention, a full four centuries in advance of Europe,
movable type remained a marginal technology in China up until the late 19th
century. China printed books in large quantities and developed a dynamic
private publishing sector, but almost all of this printing was made using xylography. Movable type was never forgotten, but its use was mainly limited
to the e¤orts of some wealthy enthusiast not printing for pro…t and, more
notably, to large government projects such as the printing of Imperial Encyclopaedias.4 Chow (2004, p. 68) tells us that we know of about 100 book
titles printed using wooden movable type during the Ming dynasty, which,
even if reported to our total for the second half of the Ming dynasty, equals
just 1.5% of all titles.
In opposition to China’s early invention and slow and progressive transition to printing, the West discovered printing only towards the middle of
the 15th century and saw the invention spread like bush …re. Block printing
and movable type appear at about the same time, though the techniques
used in block printing can be traced back to the printing of sacred images
during the 14th century (Febvre and Martin 1976, p. 45-49). Block printing
pretty much disappears as a technology for producing text after the 15th
century, while movable type becomes ubiquitous. Europeans printed their
…rst book using movable type in the 1450s, yet the technology was in place
4
These were projects of truly gigantic scale. As an example, the Grand Encyclopaedia of
Ancient and Modern Knowledge (Gujin Tushu Jicheng), presented to the Chinese Emperor
around the year 1725, consisted of 5,020 volumes, 800,000 pages and over 100 million
Chinese characters. Sixty-six copies of the full Encyclopaedia were made (Tsien 1985, p.
185, 216).
8
in 110 towns and cities throughout Europe by 1480 and in as many as 236
places by 1500 (Febvre and Martin 1976, p. 182, 186). Printing shops were
present from Portugal to Russia and far beyond the main cities, in places
such as Angoulême, L’Aquila or Kuttenberg.
China’s failure to adopt the more advanced technology of movable type,
and the rather limited number of book titles it produced, should not obscure
the fact that China’s printing industry was successful along other important
dimensions. First among these, books were probably more a¤ordable in
China as compared to Europe. In order to support this claim, I calculate the
ratio of book prices to the daily wage of low-skill workers in early modern
Europe and China.5
For Europe, I use the very detailed dataset from Clark (2005, 2007) which
contains both wage rates and book prices for 18th century England - arguably
Europe’s richest region at the time.6 Book prices are quoted for a 200-page
exemplar, and I calculate a 50-year moving average of the ratio between the
price of such a book and the daily wage of farm workers or building labourers.
The ratio ‡uctuates between 7 and 8 for farm workers and between 6 and 7
for building labourers. It would thus have cost about 7 days worth of wages
for a low-skill worker to a¤ord a 200-page book in 18th century England.
For China one …nds many quotations of book prices but rarely do they
state the number of pages. As we need to compare prices on books of similar
length, I use the detailed analysis of Chow (2004), where the di¤erent costs of
producing a book are speci…ed on a per-page basis. These values can thus be
scaled to our desired 200-page length by assuming constant returns to scale.
5
The ratio is used in order to render nominal book prices comparable. Low-skill workers
were mostly illiterate in early modern China and Europe and would not have bought many
books.
6
The data has been reformatted and converted to metric by Peter Lindert, and is
available online at http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/Data…lelist.htm. The data on book prices
begins only in 1691.
9
If anything, this assumption should make Chinese prices appear dearer than
they were as some economies of scale would be present in book production.
Chow (2004, p. 45) explains how a 24-page booklet could be produced at
a unit cost of 0.011 taels in 1608, and that assuming a 100 percent pro…t it
would sell for 0.022 taels in the market. A 200-page book would then sell for
about 0.18 taels. Wages for a construction worker during the same period
were about 1 tael per month (idem, p. 53). To pass from monthly to daily
wages we refer to van Dyke (2005), who quotes Chinese low-skilled labour
wages in both monthly and daily form for the 18th century revealing a ratio
of 20 to 25 between them. This results in a low-skilled wage of 0.04 to 0.05
taels per day for the early 1600s. This …gure is corroborated by Allen et
al. (2011), who calculate an average daily wage of 0.044 taels for unskilled
labour in late 18th century China. Using a value of 0.045, a 200-page book
would have cost about 4 times the daily wage of a low-skill labourer in early
modern China; or slightly more than half the real cost of books in Europe at
a comparable historical period.
Thus, despite its technological simplicity, Chinese printing was able to
deliver books at low prices to Chinese readers - almost certainly the result of the lower cost of paper in early modern China (Chow 2004, p. 29).
This success, however, sat alongside a relative poverty in the diversity of the
printing output, as the estimates on book titles produced made abundantly
clear. Worthy of notice, these outcomes seem in accordance with the choice
of printing technology. The great advantage of movable type is to reduce
the cost of producing new pages of text, thus new book titles. Arranging
exiting wooden or metal characters into a form is a far less costly process
than carving them into a wooden block. On the other hand, once the characters have been arranged or the woodblock carved, movable type o¤ers no
cost advantage for producing copies of the prepared text. The production
of copies was essentially the same under both technologies, and its cost was
determined above all by the cost of paper. Thus, block printing could match
10
movable type at producing large number of copies of a given text, but it was
at a considerable disadvantage when producing a variety of di¤erent texts.
3
Costs of printing in China and the West
Scholars of the history of Chinese printing have long pointed at the complexity of China’s logographic script as the main reason behind its failure to adopt
movable type technology. As Denis Twitchett explains, "The basic problem
of Chinese typography was, and still remains, the fact that the repertory of
Chinese characters is virtually limitless. Even today, after decades of e¤orts
at limiting the number of characters in use, a Chinese printer needs an active stock of more than 8’000 characters, [...] No Chinese printer ever had a
‘complete’font including every Chinese character" (Twitchett 1983, p.76).7
To be clear, the problem was not that Chinese printers needed to produce
thousands of types in order to use movable type technology, for that was also
the case in the West. A medium-sized, private-owned printshop in China
would have been able to operate with about 40,000 types (Heijdra 2004).
That is not more than what was common in the West, as inventories of early
modern printshops commonly reveal fonts of 40,000 to 80,000 types (Febvre
and Martin 1976, p. 110-11). Western alphabets may consists of less than 30
distinct characters, but each character is repeated a large number of times
within a given page. The problem, then, was not the total number of types
needed but their structure. Europeans needed a large number of copies of a
reduced set of distinct characters while the Chinese required a small number
of copies of a very large set of distinct characters.
These di¤erent requirements resulted in very di¤erent printing costs, and
that for two reasons. First, the cost of producing a large number of copies of
7
Similar opinions regarding the di¢ culty of implementing movable type printing with
the Chinese script can be found in Carter (1955, p. 242), Febvre and Martin (1976, p.
75), McLuhan (p. 152 check) and Eisenstein (1979, p.27 f.65 check).
11
a reduced set of distinct characters is much smaller than that of producing a
few copies of a very large set. There are important economies of scale in the
production of copies of a given character. Indeed, the most important contribution of Gutenberg to printing technology was arguably not the invention
of the printing press but rather the development of the punch-matrix process
for the production of types. In this process, a punch was carved with the
shape of each letter in a hard metal like steel, which was then used to strike
a soft copper matrix to create a mould. The moulds could then be used to
cast a large number of copies of each letter by …lling them with hot metal in
liquid form. The process is economical as long as the number of copies to be
produced out of each distinct character is large. If that is not the case, the
preferred method is to carve each individual type on a soft metal such as copper or even on wood, as was indeed done in China. Using the punch-matrix
process Europeans were able to produce a set of several thousand western
characters for a fraction of the cost of a full font of Chinese types.
But this was not all, for a second and equally imposing problem faced
Chinese printers brave enough to employ movable type. Once types are produced, the largest use of labour involves the composition of the text into
a form. This is an easy enough job with a western alphabet, as copies of
every existing character can be arranged within a middle-sized box with a
few dozen compartments. In contrast, the challenge of …nding the precise
Chinese character among a collection of several thousand ones is of a di¤erent magnitude. The Chinese developed practical methods to navigate their
collection of types in search of the required one, but a standard page of text
could always be composed much faster, ergo for a fraction of the cost, in
Europe.
The …rst contribution of this paper is to translate the above descriptions
into precise statements about the di¤erences in cost functions for printing
between China and Europe. This allows us to pass from the correct insights
12
of historians of Chinese printing towards a formal analysis of the costs and
bene…ts of book production, and the resulting market outcomes.
The total cost of any early modern printing project may be divided into
two broad categories. First, for every distinct page there is the cost of producing woodblocks under block printing and composing the text under movable
type. This cost is thus proportional to the number of distinct pages being
printed or, if we normalize the length of a book to a certain number of pages,
to the number of book titles. Second, there is the cost of producing copies
out of each woodblock or form. This corresponds to the cost of paper, ink
and labour employed in printing. This cost is proportional to the total number of printed pages, which equals the print run of each book title times the
number of distinct pages. To this, movable type printers should add a third
item: the initial cost of producing a full set of types, which must be in place
before the …rst page is composed.
Let us normalize the length of a book to K distinct pages and de…ne its
print run as ri , with the subscript i indexing book titles (i = 1; :::; n). The
cost of producing ri units of title i using block printing technology would
then be:
Cib = ri K + b K
(1)
where is the cost of paper, ink and labour per printed page and b is
the cost in materials and labour of carving a one-page woodblock. We may
refer to as the marginal cost of printing copies.
For movable type, the cost of producing ri units of title i would be given
by:
Cim = ri K +
m
K +F
(2)
where is the same as above, m is the cost of composing one page of
text and F the cost of a full set of types. As we see, movable type o¤ers no
advantage over block printing for making copies out of a previously composed
13
(or carved) page of text. On the other hand, movable type reduces the cost
of producing new pages of text, and therefore new titles, since composing
a page of text, even with Chinese characters, is less costly than carving a
woodblock of the same page ( m < b ). For a pro…t-maximizing printing
entrepreneur, the decision to use movable type depends on whether the cost
advantage on the production of distinct pages is important enough to justify
the initial …xed cost expenditure in a full set of types.8
Table 1 o¤ers a quantitative estimate of the di¤erent cost parameters
discussed above based on the historical literature. A detailed discussion of
how I calculate these values and the sources I use is provided in Appendix
1.9
[Table 1 here]
All cost parameters are reported in two forms. First, I normalize all costs
by the daily wage of low-skill labour. For example, the value of 2:78 for
parameter b in China results from dividing the cost of producing a onepage woodblock in local currency, which I estimate at 0:125 taels, by the
daily wage of low-skill labour in local currency, which is 0:045 taels. These
…gures are reported in the …rst column of table 1.
The second column transforms the purchasing power of the values in the
8
For simplicity, I am assuming that woodblocks and types do not need replacing with
usage. This would introduce an additional cost in proportion to the print run, but its
magnitude would be of second order. Indeed, as much as 25,000 copies could be taken
out of a woodblock before it needs replacing (Tsien 1985, p. 370). For wooden movable
type, Heijdra (2004) estimates that a full set would need replacement after printing around
500,000 pages, while metal types would be 50 times more durable.
9
Since movable type and block printing coexisted in China over the early modern
period, the historical literature provides direct estimates of the cost parameters for both
technologies on the Chinese side. For the European case, only the costs of movable type
can be observed since block printing dissappears as a means of producing text shortly after
its introduction. I provide an estimate of what block printing technology would have cost
in Europe by assuming the same cost of producing woodblocks in terms of the local wage
rate as observed in China.
14
…rst column into US dollars of the year 1990, a standard unit used for international comparisons in historical research. To do this, I refer to Allen
et al. (2011), who calculate the purchasing power of wages in pre-industrial
China and Europe using a basket of goods that just satis…es the strict minimum requirements for not su¤ering from hunger and acute deprivation. As
discussed by Allen (2013), this basket is comparable to the ones used in very
poor countries to de…ne poverty lines; which in turn are the basis of the
World Bank international poverty line of one dollar a day, where the dollar
in question is at purchasing power parity and in prices of the year 1990.
Allen et al. (2011) report "welfare ratios", de…ned as the ratio between
the yearly earnings of an unskilled worker and the cost of buying 3.15 times
the above mentioned basket of goods during one year. Yearly earnings are
obtained by assuming 250 working days over the year, and the coe¢ cient
of 3.15 indicates the cost of maintaining a family of two adults and two
children at subsistence level. For China the welfare ratio hovers around a
value of 1.25 over most of the 18th century (there is no data available before
1738). This translates into a yearly wage of 1:25 3:15 365 = 1; 437 dollars
which, dividing by 250, gives a daily wage for unskilled labour of 5:75 dollars
of 1990. This last …gure is then used to calculate the values of column two
for China.
For Europe, Allen et al. (2011) report welfare ratios similar to those
in China for European cities in Germany and Italy, but far higher for two
English cities (London and Oxford, with welfare ratios between 3 and 4). This
is part of a general European pattern previously described in Allen (2001),
where real wages diverged in Europe over the early modern period. While
England and the Netherlands maintained real wages well above subsistence
level, the rest of continental Europe experienced a continuous decline in the
living standards of workers. By the 18th century, not only Germany and
Italy but also Spain, France, Austria and Poland were characterized by real
15
wages half or less than the level observed in England and the Netherlands
(Allen 2001). Since this paper is concerned with the comparison of Europe
with China, the experience of continental Europe weights far more than that
of England and the Netherlands, who in the year 1700 were just 8% of the
European population west of the Russian Empire. My baseline assumption
will be a welfare ratio for Western Europe as a whole of 1:375, or 10% above
the Chinese level. This estimate is based on the ratio between the European
and Chinese GDP per capita, as discussed later in the paper. This welfare
ratio translates into a daily wage for low-skill labour of 6:32 dollars of 1990.
Table 1 gives substance to the claims made above regarding the cost advantage enjoyed by Europeans in movable type technology. When considered
in terms of the local cost of low-skill labour, text composition was 8 times
more expensive in China, with a per page cost of 1.39 times the daily wage
as opposed to 0.17 times the daily wage in Europe. Cost di¤erences were
equally important for the production of types. A full set of types, even when
produced on wood, cost 1,660 times the daily wage in China as opposed to
167 times the daily wage for metal types in Europe - 10 times greater. If
we were to consider the production of metal types in China, the ratio rises
to 40. On the other hand, China did enjoy an important advantage in the
cost of the main raw material for the production of copies, namely paper.
This leads to a parameter of about half the size in China as compared to
Europe.
The subsequent sections of the paper incorporate these cost di¤erences
into a model of the book market in early modern China and Europe and
investigate the consequences.
16
4
The Economics of Printing
Two important characteristics of the printing world in early modern China
and Europe will guide our modelling of the market for books. First, most
books were produced by small, pro…t-seeking entrepreneurs in competition
with each other. Second, the book market was essentially an urban market,
with both producers and consumers located in towns and relatively little
demand from the countryside.
As emphasized by Dittmar (2013), European printing was carried out
almost entirely by family-sized businesses in the pursuit of making money. As
a new technology, printing escaped guild regulation and was able to expand
freely. While it is true that in China the state played a major role during the
…rst centuries after the invention of printing, by the turn of the 16th century
most authors emphasize the importance of private publishing throughout the
empire (Chow 2004, Meyer-Fong 2007). As was the case in Europe, printing
entrepreneurs competed …ercely against each other and were quick to react
to market demands such as texts for the civil service examinations.
The urban nature of printing was dictated by its requirement in specialized labour - in particular literate workers. Moreover, large transportation
costs meant that production had to be located close to consumers, who in
turn clustered in towns and cities. Transportation costs also meant that
book production could typically be found in most towns and cities of a certain importance, as distributing from a single location was typically more
expensive than reprinting in many. Intercity trade did of course take place
but, as Dittmar (2013, p. 3) points out, "local exposure to content was very
highly correlated with local book production." The model below will exploit
this ambivalence whereby inter-city trade was costly enough to encourage
book production in a multitude of cities but not too costly as to eliminate
potential competition from neighbouring cities.
17
Given these characteristics, the model determines the outcomes in the
book market at the city level. Once this is done, I scale up the results to
the national level using estimates of the size and distribution of the urban
population in China and Europe during the early modern period. I will not
consider the demand for books from rural households on the grounds that
literacy rates were very low in the countryside and transportation costs far
higher.10
4.1
Demand
Our unit of analysis on the demand side will be the household, not the
individual. Households don’t tend to buy more than one copy of any given
book title, as a single copy may be shared among all household members
with little loss of utility.
The model uses partial equilibrium analysis given the small size of the
book market relative to the overall economy. There is a small empirical
literature estimating the demand for books in di¤erent national markets in
present times: see Hjorth-Andersen (2000), Prieto-Rodriguez et al. (2005),
and Ringstad and Loyland (2006). Without exception, these papers estimate
how overall book consumption relates to income and the overall price of books
- they do not address how the demand for an individual book title may vary
following a change in that title’s price.
Following this literature, I consider a local economy populated by a certain number of book-consuming households, each with a demand for books
of the form:
B= R P
(3)
10
Of course, a rich elite of landowners - who certainly consumed books - was in place in
both China and Europe. This elite, however, would also spend large parts of the year in
the city - among other reasons to pro…t from the cultural o¤erings there. They may thus
be considered as counted within the urban population. See Dewald (1996, pp. 48-50) for
a discussion of the European case.
18
where B is the number of books consumed, R is the income of the household, P is an index of book prices, and and are positive parameters
representing the income and price elasticities of book demand.11 Equation
(3) does not make reference to the price of individual book titles, but we will
assume that all titles sell for the same price so that P is both the price of individual titles and an index of book prices. This corresponds well with reality,
where price competition among di¤erent book titles is very limited: blockbusters and obscure titles tend to sell for a similar price. The assumption of
a common price for all titles is given a theoretical justi…cation below.
Since no household buys more than one copy of any given title, B is also
the number of book titles bought by every household. Finally, I note that
the total number of titles available has no bearing on equation (3) - a richer
variety of books does not lead to more books being consumed. This is an
unrealistic feature of this demand function, and one that will be modi…ed
later on as we search for accurate simulation outcomes.
The total number of book-consuming households in the local economy is
given by N , and I’ll assume they all have the same income and face the same
prices. It follows that N B is the total number of books sold in this economy.
This total can be divided into the sales of each individual book title. To do
so, we’ll assume that households are able to rank all available titles in terms
of some household-speci…c preferences. As all titles sell for the same price,
each household will simply buy the B titles they like the most. The speci…c
mix of titles chosen di¤ers from household to household - this is not a model
with a representative consumer. Naturally, some titles will be more popular
than others and will be chosen by a larger number of households. We pin
down the sales for each individual title by assuming that if we rank titles by
sales, the number of units sold for each title and its rank satisfy a Zipf law.
11
The functional form in (3) is standard in the empirical literature as it corresponds to
a log-linear demand function.
19
As is well-known, a Zipf law is in place whenever a series of observations
which can be ranked is characterized by a linear relationship between the log
of the observed value and the log of its rank. Zipf laws have been documented
in a large number of cultural markets: for movie revenues (De Vanny 2006),
concert tickets (Connolly and Krueger 2006), visits to internet sites (Adamic
and Huberman 2002) and, indeed, book sales (Newman 2005, Ga¤eo et al.
2008). A Zipf law may arise in all these markets because phenomena such as
word-of-mouth tend to concentrate the overall demand into a few "winners",
leaving a relatively small share of total sales for all remaining items. I will
assume that such phenomena were already at work in early modern Europe
and China, and that the market for books could already be described by a
Zipf law back then.
Let us order titles by their rank and note as si;n the share of title i in total
book sales when the number of book titles available in the local economy is
equal to n: If a Zipf law characterizes the sales of all titles, it is relatively
straightforward to show that
si;n =
1
i
n
X
(4)
1
j
j=1
where parameter is the slope of the relationship between log sales and log
rank.12 Thus, the sales of the title with rank i equal si;n N B, and this last
expression can also be considered the demand for title i under a common
price for all titles. It is useful to note that, for any given value of i, si;n is
decreasing in n : the shares of all titles fall with the total number of titles.
12
A Zipf law is in place in the book market if the sales of the i th ranked title, Si ,
are linked to its rank by the relationship log Si = a
log i: Taking exponentials on both
sides leads to Si = bi with b = ea : Adding over all available titles results in:
n
P
i=1
Si = b
n
P
i=1
20
1
i
4.2
The market under block printing technology
I start by analyzing the market under the assumption that entrepreneurs
use block printing technology. As was described above, there are no …xed
costs for using this technology, which implies that a single …rm producing
n book titles has no cost advantage over n …rms producing one book title
each. These conditions will naturally tend to discourage …rm concentration,
and we’ll assume that each individual title is produced by a di¤erent …rm.
There is free entry into the market for books, so the number of printing
entrepreneurs will be endogenously determined by the existence of pro…t
opportunities.
Printing entrepreneurs are able to access a pool of handwritten manuscripts from where they choose a title to be produced for the market. I assume
that these handwritten manuscripts are freely available and that the author
of a manuscript that is chosen for printing signs an exclusivity agreement
with the printing entrepreneur. In other words, the printing entrepreneur
becomes a monopolist for that particular title.
A printing entrepreneur with a monopoly for one particular title will want
to chose a title price that maximizes his pro…t given the conditions in the
book market (in particular, the number of alternative titles and their price).
In order to abstract from strategic behaviour among …rms, we’ll assume that
the demand for each individual title has an in…nite elasticity with respect
to its own price (given the price of all other titles). Thus, if any individual
producer were to price his title marginally above the other titles in the market
If we normalize total sales to 1 the equation above can be solved for b :
b= P
n
i=1
1
1
i
Substituting this last expression in Si = bi
leads to equation (4) once we note that
si , the share of title i in total shares, equal Si if total sales are normalized to 1.
21
he would see his sales plummet to zero, while pricing marginally below other
titles would attract all the market. Under these conditions, no individual …rm
would want to price above the market level and all …rms would be tempted
to underprice their rivals. Prices would be driven towards the marginal cost
of printing copies, pro…ts would turn negative (given the cost of producing
woodblocks) and …rms would exit the market.
As this is not a sensible solution, I assume that book producers agree not
to underprice each other by setting a common price for all titles in the market
(resulting in the demand for books given by equation 3). The establishment
of such an agreement would be eased by the fact that, under the assumption
that all book titles are priced equally, the same price maximizes the pro…ts
of all …rms - providing a natural focal point on which to agree. Indeed, the
pro…t of an individual title producer is given by P ri ( ri K + b K) where P
is the price of his (and all) titles, ri is its print run and ri K + b K the cost
of producing ri copies of the title using block printing technology (equation
1 above). The price that maximizes this individual pro…t will be given by
the solution to
b
max(P
K)ri
K
(5)
P
As we abstract from informational problems, the print run of each title
will be given by its demand which, under the assumption of a common price
for all titles is given by si;n N B with B = R P . Substituting into (5)
leads to:
b
max(P
K)si;n N R P
K
(6)
P
which has the same solution for all …rms as the share of each …rm in total
sales, si;n , does not depend on P: All …rms will therefore have the same
optimal price, given by:
(7)
P = K
1
The optimal price for a book is thus a markup over the marginal cost
22
of printing copies. A larger price elasticity of demand results in a smaller
markup, and the condition > 1 needs to be satis…ed for this pricing formula
to result in a positive price.
The pro…t of each individual producer can be obtained by substituting
(7) into (6), which results in
b
i;n
= si;n
1
K
1
1
N R
b
K
(8)
The only term that is not an exogenous parameter in the above pro…t
function is si;n : It follows that the pro…t of each block printing entrepreneur
will, like si;n , fall monotonically as rank increases and that an increase in
the number of titles available decreases the pro…ts of all entrepreneurs.
All of the above has been derived taking the number of titles in the local
market as given. To address this, I assume that printing entrepreneurs will
enter the market as long as the pro…t from doing so is positive and title rank
is determined by order of arrival. In other words, for a total number of titles
equal to n the …rst entrepreneur would get a pro…t of b1;n , the second one
b
b
b
2;n and the last one
n;n is
n;n : Thus, the highest value of n for which
still positive gives the number of titles in the market under block printing
technology.
4.3
The market under movable type technology
Movable type producers need to incur the …xed cost of a full set of types
before starting production. This set of types may well be used for producing
di¤erent titles, leading to economies of scale and a tendency towards concentration on the supply side of the market. Indeed, the carefully collated data
of Dittmar (2013) on European cities with printing …rms indicates that 45%
among them were characterized by one single …rm.
23
To facilitate the analysis I will assume there is no counteracting force to
this tendency towards concentration: once a …rm pays the initial …xed cost
of movable type, it may produce as many book titles and book copies as it
wishes. Under these conditions, all cities choosing movable type production
will have a single …rm supplying their market. Of course, in reality there was
a limit to the number of books that could be produced out of a single set of
movable type characters and, for the European case, out of a single printing
press. Large European cities were thus characterized by several printing
…rms, as the data from Dittmar (2013) also makes clear. This, however,
would greatly complicate the analysis without obvious gains in insight - as
I hope to persuade the reader in what follows. Furthermore, at least for
the Chinese case this assumption is irrelevant since my simulations show
that Chinese cities were not able to sustain even one single movable type
producer under these most bene…cial conditions.
Quite conveniently, the pricing rule derived above for the case of block
printing also applies under movable type with one producer. Indeed, price
competition among titles would be self-defeating for a single …rm; so the …rm
will price all titles equally. For each title, the pro…t-maximizing price would
be given by the solution to:
max(P
P
m
K)si;n N R P
K
which di¤ers from (6) only by a constant ( m in place of b ). The optimal
price for all titles would therefore be the same as in block printing, leading
to the following pro…t per title:
m
i;n
= si;n
1
K
1
1
N R
m
K
(9)
On the other hand, determining the number of available titles is a less
straightforward exercise than in the case of block printing. Since we assumed
24
a di¤erent producer for each title under block printing, the condition bn;n > 0
was su¢ cient for guaranteeing the introduction of the n-th title. In the case
of movable type with a single producer, it is easy to show that overall pro…ts
will always fall with the introduction of one additional title regardless of the
value of m
n;n : Indeed, adding pro…ts over all titles results in:
n
P
i=1
m
i;n
=
1
K
1
1
N R
n
m
K
(10)
which is strictly decreasing in n. Intuitively, since aggregate demand does
not depend on the number of titles, the sales of an additional title come at the
expense of all previously existing titles. It follows that aggregate revenues
do not change with one additional title, while aggregate costs increase by
m
K: By the same logic, this producer would always increase his pro…ts by
producing one title less, so the pro…t-maximizing number of titles would be
one.
In order to obtain a realistic solution for the number of titles available in
each city I introduce a feature of the early modern book market which has
not featured so far: inter-city book trade. As discussed above, books could
be moved between cities - albeit at a cost. For any …rm, the introduction of
an additional title in a city other than his own does not cannibalize sales in
his home market. It follows that …rms from neighbouring cities will always be
willing to introduce new titles as long as the bene…t from doing so outweighs
the costs.13
We may model transport costs per book as proportional to printing costs
per book - K. Indeed, transport costs will depend on the weight and volume
of the items being transported which, in turn, are determined by the number
of pages per book (K) and the quality of the paper used ( ). In that case,
13
For the case of block printing the possibility of inter-city trade does not change anything since local competition already exhausts all pro…t opportunities.
25
the cost of producing ri units of title i and transporting them for sale on a
neighbouring city would be:
Cim; = (1 + )ri K +
m
(11)
K
which is similar to the standard cost function under movable type as
given by equation (2) with the addition of transport costs equal to ri K:
Parameter measures transport costs as a proportion of printing costs.
Firms from neighbouring cities would be forced to sell books at the same
price as local providers, that is P = K 1 : The pro…t to a foreign …rm
for introducing title i may therefore be calculated by considering that the
demand for such title would be given by given by si;n N B, with B = R P ,
while the cost of supplying this quantity would be given by equation (11),
with ri = si;n N B. In de…nitive:
m;
i;n
= si;n
1
K
1
1
N R (1
(
1))
m
K
(12)
This pro…t function di¤ers from m
(
1))
i;n only by the factor (1
multiplying the …rst term (see equation 9). The pro…t to a foreign …rm
from the introduction of the n-th title would be m;
n;n , so book titles will
be introduced as long as m;
n;n > 0: Faced with this competitive threat, the
local book producer would rather introduce an additional title himself as the
cost of doing so is smaller than the revenue that would be lost to a foreign
…rm otherwise. Indeed, the di¤erence between this revenue and the cost of
producing an additional title is given by m
n;n , which is necessarily positive
since (1
(
1)) < 1: In de…nitive, the possibility of inter-city trade forces
the local producer into a competitive outcome, and the number of titles in
each city would be determined by a condition similar in form to the one for
block printing.14
14
By the same token, the possibility of inter-city trade renders the assumption of a single
26
To summarize, the analysis above determines the price and the number of
titles available per city under block printing and under movable type technology. The print run of each title would be given by si;n N B using the price and
the number of titles available. The only remaining question is which technology would be in use. The most natural assumption is that the technology
that leads to larger overall pro…ts will eventually impose itself. For instance,
if the pro…ts that would be obtained under movable type are larger than
the sum of all individual …rm pro…ts under block printing, a Pareto-superior
solution exists for these …rms if they decide to merge and use movable type
technology to supply the local market. In the opposite case, the individual …rms will see no reason to merge and will remain using block printing
technology.
With the above model in hand, we turn to the historical literature in
order to obtain quantitative estimates of all the magnitudes involved. This
will allow us to simulate the model and study its predictions for the cases of
early modern China and Europe.
5
Model calibration
The calibration for cost parameters has been presented in table 1. Here I
turn to the di¤erent magnitudes required by the demand side of the market
in order to simulate the model. The demand for books from an individual
household is given by R P , which requires an estimate of income per
household, the income and price elasticities of book demand, and parameter
(the price of books is endogenously determined by the model). It is important to note that we refer here to book-consuming households, not to all
households, as only a section of the population was literate.
movable type producer per city quite innocuous: the producer is forced into competitive
behaviour anyway.
27
This household demand is multiplied by N , the number of book-consuming
households in the local economy, for which we need to consider urban populations, population structure and literacy rates in early modern China and
Europe. Finally, to pass from the overall demand for books in each city to
the demand for individual titles we need a value for parameter , the slope
of the Zipf law for book sales.
On the supply side, the last piece of information that the model requires
will be an estimate of the cost of transporting books between neighbouring
cities.
The objective is to calibrate the model with values corresponding to the
period 1550-1650, roughly in line with the years for which we have comparable
data on the number of book titles produced in China and Europe (1522-1644).
For magnitudes such as urban populations and household income, I am able
to provide separate …gures for China and Europe which correspond to this
period. For many other parameters, however, this is not possible. In such
cases I follow one of the following two alternatives. First, I use an estimate
that corresponds to one particular European region and apply it to Europe
as a whole and to China. Second, if no estimate exists for the early modern
period, I use present-day values as a guide. The resulting simulations ought
to be interpreted as accounting for di¤erences between China and Europe in
population and income, but abstracting from di¤erences in other areas.
Income of book-consuming households
I start by estimating the income of the average household in the population. The most direct method is to use estimates of GDP per capita and
multiply by the average number of household members. Following the work
of Broadberry et al. (2011), who estimate GDP per capita for England all
the way back to the year 1270, new European estimates have been produced
for Holland, Italy and Spain, while Broadberry et al. (2013) construct new
estimates for China. This new set of estimates is clearly preferable to the
28
older …gures from Maddison (2001), which have been commonly used in the
literature over the last 15 years but are not backed by solid evidence. As
it turns out, these new estimates of GDP per capita are considerably larger
than the Maddison …gures.
If we focus our comparison over the 16th and 17th centuries, Broadberry
et al. (2013) provide us with an estimated Chinese GDP per capita of $1,127
for the year 1500, $968 for the year 1570, and $977 for the year 1600 - all
in dollars of the year 1990. The average of $1,024 may be rounded to about
$1,000 per year.
For Europe we have the problem of having data for just four countries,
one of which was far ahead of the continental average by the 16th century and
represented a mere 2% of the European population - Holland. The average
of GDP per capita for England, Italy and Spain is $1,135 in the year 1500,
$1,157 in 1570, $1,104 in 1600, and $1,067 in 1650. In comparison, Holland
is estimated to have a GDP per capita of $2,372 for the year 1600. In what
follows I exclude Holland as it’s a clear outlier for the European case and
consider a value of $1,100 for the GDP per capita of Europe as a whole.
Turning to the average number of household members, we may obtain an
estimate by considering a couple with a number of dependents equal to the
dependency rate for the overall population.15 For the dependency rate we
have very detailed data for England from Wrigley et al. (1997, p. 615), who
estimate the age structure of the population at …ve year intervals since 1541.
Taking the average from this initial year until 1641 results in a value of 0.727
dependants per working-age adult. A household with two adults would thus
be composed of 3.454 persons. Using this value as representative of both
Europe and China leads to an income per household of $3,454 for China and
$3,799 for Europe.
15
This overestimates average household members slightly, as it assumes no single-parent
households.
29
The …nal step requires us to pass from the income of an average household
to the income of book-consuming households. We’ll assume that only literate
households consume books, and note that literacy was strongly correlated
with income during this period. In order to proceed we need an estimate of
literacy rates in early modern China and Europe. Albeit literacy rates for the
whole population ranged between 5 and 10% in early modern Europe (Allen
2003), what we need are literacy rates for the urban population, which were
considerably higher. Allen (2003) uses a literacy rate of 23% for European
cities in 1500, based on a value for Venice in 1587. For China, we do not have
an estimate for the early modern period but Rawski (1979) puts the literacy
rate of 19th century China at about the same level as that in Southern and
Eastern Europe at the same time. Based on this, I will assume a urban
literacy rate for the early modern period in line with Europe, which I round
to 25% for the period 1550-1650.
Assuming that the 25% of households who were literate corresponds to the
richest 25% of households in the economy, we may pass from our estimates
of average household income to the average income of literate households by
using …gures for the distribution of income. For this purpose I am forced to
turn to present-day data since early modern estimates would be too imprecise.
I take present-day Bangladesh, with a GDP per capita of $1,016 in the year
2005 (in dollars of 1990), as a reasonable approximation for early modern
economies. Using survey data, the ratio of the average income among the
top 25% of households to the average household income is 2.15.16
Multiplying our …gures for average household income by 2.15, we …nd
estimates of R - the average income of book-consuming households - equal
16
Source: World Income Inequality Database version 2.0c, May 2008. Data available
at http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/Database/en_GB/database/ . The data provides
income shares by decile, so I assume a uniform distribution of income among the third
highest decile. The ratio is not particularly sensitive to the degree of inequality in the
population. If instead of Bangladesh we would consider Brazil, which has one of the
highest levels of inequality in the world, the ratio would become 2.82.
30
to $7,426 for China and $8,168 for Europe.
Income and price elasticities of book demand
For these parameters we are certainly restricted to present-day …gures.
There are not many studies of the demand for books in individual countries,
but those that are available show quite a consistent picture. A summary of
the income and price elasticities for book demand obtained by this literature
is presented in table 2. Taking the middle point of the range of estimates
in Hjorth-Andersen (2000) and Ringstad and Loyland (2006), and averaging
over the three available studies, I calculate a guideline value of 1.53 for the
income elasticity and -1.76 for the price elasticity of book demand.
[Table 2 here]
Share of books in total expenditure (parameter )
I replace the problem of …nding an estimate for parameter by that of
…nding an estimate for the share of book expenditures in total expenditures, a
magnitude for which a quantitative estimate is far more feasible. Indeed, for
given values of income, book prices, and book demand elasticities, the share of
books in total expenditures and parameter are in a one-to-one relationship.
Let us call this share , and note that it equals total expenditures on books,
P B, divided by household income. Using equation (3) we obtain:
=
PB
= R
R
1
P1
(13)
As a baseline scenario, I will assume that early modern China and Europe were characterized by the same share of book expenditures in total
expenditures among literate households.17
In order to estimate , we may start by considering the share of book
expenditures in total GDP among present-day advanced economies. For the
17
Given that China and Europe had di¤erent income levels and book prices, this amounts
to assuming di¤erent values of parameter :
31
year 1999, Canoy et al. (2006) report values of 0.30% for France, 0.35% for
the US, 0.36% for the UK and 0.42% for Germany. With an income elasticity
larger than one, we would expect this share to be considerably smaller in the
much poorer economies of early modern Europe and China. On the other
hand, books had far fewer competitors in early modern markets for cultural
and entertainment goods, whereas present-day consumers divide their expenditures between books, movies, records, concerts, theatre, museums, and
more.
For simplicity, I will set the value of
at 0.10% for both China and
Europe. The value re‡ects the lower income levels of the early modern period
but does not account for the limited availability of alternatives to books.
Accordingly, higher values of will also be considered following our baseline
simulations.18
Urban population
Table 3 presents a summary view of the size and distribution of the urban
population in Europe and China around the year 1600, using data from Nunn
and Qian (2011). While China was considerably more populous throughout
the early modern period, the two regions were very similar in terms of total
urban population in 1600 - and would thus have similarly-sized book markets.
I use the year 1600 as it lies at the midpoint of the interval 1550-1650 and may
therefore represent an adequate average for the period. It is worth keeping in
mind, however, that Europe’s urban population was probably growing much
faster than China’s over this period: Europe’s total urban population passes
from 1.7 million in 1500 to 2.6 million in 1600 to 4.3 million in 1700, while the
corresponding numbers for China are 2.2 million, 2.6 million and 2.7 million.
Finally, I also note that China’s urban system was far more concentrated
18
It is worth noting that our estimate of 0.10% is not the share of book expenditures over
GDP, as for modern economies, but the share of book expenditures in total expenditures
for book-consuming households. Since these households were but a small part of total
population, the share relative to GDP would be much smaller.
32
than Europe’s, as could perhaps be expected given its political unity. China’s
largest city was almost three times more populous than Europe’s largest, but
Europe had a bigger number of small and mid-sized cities.
[Table 3 here]
The number of book-consuming households in a city - what we called
parameter N in our model - can be obtained by dividing the city’s population
by the number of persons per household and multiplying by the urban literacy
rate. As discussed above, I use an estimate of 3.454 persons per household
and a urban literacy rate of 25%. A city with a population of 100,000 would
thus contain 7,238 literate households.
Slope of the Zipf law for books
In order to estimate a Zipf law for books we require data on either the
sales or the print runs of all books during a given time period. This is not
possible for early modern times, where print runs are known only in a few
cases and sales essentially never. We must therefore turn to present-day
estimates. I use the work of Ga¤eo et al. (2008), whose estimates of the
slope of the Zipf law for the sales of books in Italy over the period 1994-1996
fall mainly within the interval 1.0-1.4. I use the middle point of this interval
in what follows. Ga¤eo et al. regress log rank on log sales, so the estimated
slope must be inverted for the purpose of the model - leading to a value of
equal to 0.83.
Transport costs
The model refers to the cost of transporting books from a neighbouring
city. As the number of cities with printing presses was very large in Europe,
this should be thought as a city lying within a radius of about 100-200 km.
There are two references to transport costs in Febvre and Martin (1976).
First, the authors estimate the cost of transporting books from Lyon to
Poitiers at around 20% of the printing costs (p. 113). The transport is
33
overland and the cities are separated by 467 km. by today’s roads. Second,
the authors mention that a shipment of books (apparently 21 volumes) from
Lyon to La Rochelle (609 km. by today’s roads) would cost 5-6 livres, while
shipping from Lyon to Nantes via the river Loire would come to just 1 livre
7 sols (p. 349). This comes to 5-6 sols per book for the overland transport
and 1.3 sol for the river transport. The authors don’t tell us the value of the
books being transported, but if we use our European estimate of seven times
the daily wage of low-skill labour each book would come at 42 sols; resulting
in transport costs of 12-14% for the overland route and 3% for the river
route. Given that we have in mind a distance between cities considerably
smaller than that separating Lyon from Poitiers or La Rochelle, but without
the bene…t of a river or sea connecting them, I will assume a transport cost
equal to 10% of printing costs in what follows.
6
Simulation results
The only parameter for which the preceding section has not yet assigned a
value is K, the number of pages per book. This parameter is of a certain importance since we are assuming that book titles must be produced in discrete
units. Thus, the decision of producing one additional title is a commitment
to produce woodblocks or arrange text for an additional K pages. For the
purpose of model simulation, it is sensible to chose a relatively low …gure.
Indeed, a large value for K would render the supply of titles relatively unresponsive to changes in demand - it would take a large demand movement to
convince …rms to produce one additional title. If we chose K rather small,
…rms will be able to produce titles even for a small market and respond to
modest changes in market size.
I simulate the model using a value of K equal to 50 pages, guided by the
OECD working de…nition of a book, which is a manuscript of 50 pages or
more. A title of, say, 200 pages can be understood as four titles of 50 pages
34
put together - which is precisely what happens when a lengthy book which
was produced in several volumes is printed as a single volume later on. Thus,
we can easily pass from our simulated results in terms of 50-page books to a
di¤erent book length more representative of books in the market by dividing
the number of titles we obtain accordingly. In short, using a value of 50
for the number of pages per book in our simulations adds ‡exibility to the
supply of book titles without for that reason restricting the interpretation of
the model’s output.
Book prices
The model has the characteristic that book prices may be obtained without solving for the printing technology being chosen and even without considering most parameters on the demand side. Indeed, book prices are given by
equation (7), which only requires knowledge of the marginal cost of printing
copies - parameter - and the price elasticity of demand. Before launching ourselves into a full simulation of the model, we may well examine its
predictions with respect to book prices.
Using the values from table 1, the model predicts a price of $41.59 for a
200-page book in Europe and a price of $19.43 for the same book in China.
Dividing by our estimates for the daily wage of unskilled labour in each
region, these prices correspond to 6.58 times the European daily wage and
3.38 times the Chinese daily wage. Direct estimates of the ratio of book
prices to daily wage rates were about 7 for Europe and 4 for China, which
is quite in line with these results. The model is then consistent both with
the ratio of book prices to wages in China and Europe, as with the relative
dearness of European books as compared to Chinese ones.
Choice of printing technology
Given printing costs, the main determinant of printing technology is the
size of the local market. Indeed, block printing can be used even in small
markets as it does not involve …xed costs. Shifting from block printing to
35
movable type requires a certain market size that renders the investment in a
full set of types pro…table when spread over a large enough number of book
titles. While this is true for both China and Europe, the required market
size for movable type pro…tability will be much smaller in Europe since the
…xed cost of a full set of types is smaller and the cost savings in terms of text
composition much larger.
Since we don’t consider di¤erences in income per capita between cities, the
size of the local book market is entirely determined by the local population.
With this in mind, I simulate di¤erent scenarios by varying the size of the
local population from a minimum of 20,000 to a maximum of 800,000 - slightly
more than the population of the largest Chinese city in the year 1600. Income
is kept constant and equal to the European or Chinese average, as derived
above.
I proceed as follows. First, for a given value of the local population,
I calculate the number of book titles that would be produced under block
printing and under movable type technology. For block printing, this is
obtained by …nding the largest value of n for which bn;n , as given by equation
(8), is still positive. The same procedure is used for movable type technology
using m;
n;n , as given by equation (12).
With the number of titles in hand, we can calculate aggregate pro…ts under block printing and under movable type. The easiest way to do this is not
by calculating pro…ts per title and adding up, but by directly using equation (10) or its equivalent for the case of block printing. Finally, I compare
aggregate pro…ts under each alternative technology and assume that block
printing producers will agree to merge if pro…ts are larger under movable
type. The result of this exercise is shown in …gure 1, which plots aggregate
pro…ts under movable type minus aggregate pro…ts under block printing as
a function of local population for China and Europe.
[Figure 1 here]
36
For a local population of zero, pro…ts under block printing would be zero
whereas pro…ts under movable type would be negative and equal to the …xed
cost of this technology. It follows that both curves in …gure 1 start with a
negative value equal to the cost of a full set of types, and the Chinese curve
starts with a larger negative value. As population increases, movable type
becomes progressively more attractive since a larger market implies more
titles and therefore more savings if the production of woodblocks is replaced
by the composition of text. This is why both curves are upward-sloping. The
slopes, however, are di¤erent. Europe’s curve has a steeper slope because text
composition is far cheaper, which leads not only to larger savings per title
but also to a larger number of titles - as illustrated below.
For the calibrated parameter values, our model predicts that movable type
is already the pro…t-maximizing printing technology in Europe for a city size
of 20,000. Thus, in accordance with the historical evidence, movable type
could be adopted in Europe even in very small cities.
For China, on the other hand, movable type is never more pro…table than
block printing for cities up to a size of 800,000 - larger than the population of
Beijing around the year 1600. In short, the …xed costs of implementing this
technology in China are so large, and the ensuing gains in composition costs
so modest, that block printing remains more pro…table for any realistic size
of the local market we may consider. It is therefore not surprising that commercial publishers in China remained faithful to block printing technology
while most instances of movable type usage are due to book producers not
printing for a pro…t such as wealthy philanthropists and the government.19
19
In this context, it is noteworthy that large government encyclopaedias are a type of
printing work for which movable type is particularly adequate. Movable type gives a cost
advantage in the production of distinct pages, but no cost advantage in the production of
copies. Government encyclopaedias consisted precisely of an enormous number of pages
and were produced in very short runs - only major government cities and libraries were
to receive a copy. In all likelihood, the Chinese government was simply choosing the most
cost-e¤ective technology for a very unique type of project.
37
Number of book titles
Figures 2 and 3 present the number of book titles produced as a function
of the local population for China and Europe. In order to compare the model
estimates to the historical …gures, the numbers reported in …gures 2 and 3
correspond to 200-page titles - obtained by dividing the number of 50-page
titles from the simulated model by four. I present the number of titles that
would be produced under movable type and under block printing, although
the preceding paragraphs have made clear which technology is chosen in each
region.
[Figures 2 and 3 here]
The number of titles produced grows at a slightly slower rate than the
local population, a result that depends on the slope of the Zipf curve used.
For instance, under block printing technology both China and Europe would
produce 3.5 book titles per year for a population of 100,000 and 6.5 titles
per year for a population of 200,000. Urban concentration would then lead
to fewer book titles at the national level, but the tendency is relatively weak
and therefore unlikely to play a major role in the di¤erence between Europe
and China.
A second observation is that the increase in the number of titles from
block printing to movable type is far larger in Europe than in China. This is
of course the consequence of the smaller cost of text composition in Europe,
which allows printing …rms to extend the market towards far less successful
titles. Book titles would roughly double in China if block printing was replaced by movable type, while Europe sees a 10 to 11 fold increase in the
number of titles from the same technological shift.
The total number of titles produced in each region may be obtained by
using the data on city population from Nunn and Qian (2011) together with
the number of titles as a function of city population as given by …gures 2 and
38
3. I use city populations for the year 1600 and assign to all Chinese cities the
number of titles produced under block printing and to all European cities the
number of titles produced under movable type.20 This results in a total of
87 book titles per year for China and 1,051 book titles per year for Europe.
Multiplying by 122 gives us an estimate for total title production over the
period 1522-1644 of 10,634 titles for China and 128,268 titles for Europe;
to be compared with the historical estimates of 6,618 titles for China and
457,500 titles for Europe.
The model estimate for China seems quite sensible once we recall that
the …gure of 6,618 titles from the historical record omits titles that have disappeared altogether. A loss of about 38% of the titles produced during the
second half of the Ming dynasty is somewhat excessive, but not completely
improbable given the large disruptions endured by Chinese society over the
subsequent centuries. Alternatively, it is possible that some of the assumptions made in our simulations were too optimistic for the Chinese case. For
instance, reducing the literacy rate for urban populations in China to 20%
(and adjusting the household income of literate households accordingly) results in a total title production of 9,513. A literacy rate of 15% would result
in 8,185 titles. These are signi…cantly closer estimates to the historical record
and imply a substantially smaller rate of title loss over the last four centuries.
For Europe, on the other hand, the model estimate is too low - just 28%
of the historical record. Here, however, we may improve the performance of
the model by expanding our discussion of one of its key aspects: the fact that
demand does not react to the number of titles available. Given that European
consumers had access to a far larger variety of book titles than Chinese ones,
one would naturally expect larger expenditures on books on the European
20
Nunn and Qian (2011) list all cities with a population of 40,000 or more. For both
China and Europe, there is a small di¤erence between the total urban population and the
total population of cities with 40,000 or more inhabitants. I assume that this di¤erence is
composed by cities with a population of 20,000.
39
side. European printers were able to match the tastes of the book-reading
public far better than Chinese ones, and could produce for niche markets far
too small for their Chinese counterparts.
A way to incorporate this e¤ect in a reduced form is simply to make
parameter in the demand for books a positive function of n, the number
of book titles.21 While estimates of such a function are, to the best of my
knowledge, not available, the consequence of its existence may be studied
simply by considering that it would lead to a larger value of the share of
books in total expenditure among European households. A larger value for
is all the more acceptable as the value considered so far is probably a
lower-bound estimate given the lack of substitutes for books in early modern
markets.
Assuming that literate households in Europe dedicated 0.2% of their income to books leads to an estimate of 240,491 titles produced over a 122
year period. A value of 0.3% produces a total of 349,684 titles. Finally, a
share of 0.4% of total income leads to a total of 455,141 titles - very close to
the historical estimate cited above. An expenditure share on books of 0.4%
among the literate class in early modern Europe does not appear excessive as
it falls within the range of present-day estimates. Clark (2010) goes further
than this and assumes a share of 1% for books in his expenditure index for
England over the period 1691-1740. We may also note that assuming an expenditure share of 0.4% in Europe while keeping the value at 0.1% in China
only requires an elasticity of book consumption with respect to the number
of titles available of around 0.1. Indeed, the model would predict that a ratio
of 43 European book titles for every Chinese one goes hand in hand with a
21
Using a Dixit-Stiglitz aggregator where utility is derived from the consumption of
di¤erent varieties of books (i.e. titles) and utility increases with the number of varieties
would not be an adequate alternative. Indeed, in a Dixit-Stiglitz framework the marginal
utility of all varieties is always positive which, for the case of books, implies that households retire utility from additional copies of any given title. Furthermore, all varieties are
symmetrical under Dixit-Stiglitz, which eliminates the possibility of a Zipf law.
40
ratio of European to Chinese expenditures on books of only 4.22 In de…nitive,
with some reasonable adjustments the model satisfactorily accounts for the
di¤erences in book prices, book output, and choice of printing technology
between early modern Europe and China.
7
Concluding remarks
This paper contributes to our understanding of the di¤erences between early
modern Europe and China, and in so doing adds to the literature on the Great
Divergence between these two regions. The paper focuses on a particular
sector of the economy, the book market, but the functioning of this sector has
arguably large implications for the creation and dissemination of knowledge,
and thus a¤ects all aspects of society at large.
While much of the literature on the di¤erences between Europe and China
has focused on factors for which measurement is problematic - culture, geography, institutions - this paper is deliberately grounded on the concrete.
Thus, all aspects of the model are given a quantitative estimate, and the
model itself is judged on its capacity to approximate historical outcomes. As
it turns out, this strategy appears to be quite successful for the case under
study. We are able to explain the choice of printing technology in Europe and
China, and the far larger printing output in Europe, as the consequence of
di¤erent costs structures for printing, themselves the result of each region’s
script.
The approach of this paper may be related to Kenneth Pomeranz’s seminal contribution to the question of the Great Divergence (Pomeranz 2000), in
that China and Europe are assumed to be similar unless evidence proves the
contrary. Chinese consumers were as rational as European ones, and Chinese
producers as ingenious and as preoccupied by their bottom line. The Chinese
22
The concept of elasticity being used here is that of arc elasticity.
41
state did not regulate printing more than European ones, and assuming that
a society with a track record of inventiveness as impressive as the Chinese one
would run out of ideas to print seems inadequate. This is not say, however,
that other cultural di¤erences between China and Europe did not play a role
in this context. It is natural to think that they did, but the analysis here
advanced suggest that economic forces were strong enough to largely dictate
the outcome - at least in its main elements.
The question of what role these di¤erences in book production may play
in explaining the Great Divergence is a subject for future research. I may
note, however, that the …ndings of this paper may …t neatly within existing analyses of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence. As an
example, consider the concept of an Industrial Enlightenment, which Joel
Mokyr persuasively develops as a precursor to the European take-o¤ (Mokyr
2002). The success of printing in Europe is explicitly mentioned by Mokyr as
one of the fundamental changes leading to lower access costs to knowledge, a
central element for the success of an Industrial Enlightenment (Mokyr 2005,
p. 9). Having said this, multiple factors intervene in de…ning the wealth and
poverty of nations and the advantages that an alphabetic script confers on
printing technology can never be but one of them. In this respect, the Ottoman Empire o¤ers a useful counterexample to the European case. Movable
type printing was successfully banned in the Ottoman Empire until the 18th
century (Cosgel et al. 2012), despite its perfect suitability to the arabic script
in use, which is alphabetical. Clearly, institutional factors could matter as
well.
A second case worthy of attention is that of Korea, which during the
early 15th century developed an alphabet-based writing system that could
replace the Chinese characters in use. Given that Korea actively engaged in
movable type printing during this period, the failure of this writing system
to spur the use of the technology may be conceived as evidence against the
42
arguments of this paper - but that would be incorrect. As it turns out, the
Korean writing system did not reduce the number of distinct characters to
be produced because of its reliance on syllabic grouping. Readers interested
in this rather fascinating bit of history will …nd a more detailed explanation
in Appendix 2.
I …nalize with a reference to Thomas Francis Carter, author of the …rst
history of Chinese printing ever written in the West, who intuitively understood that di¤erences in script were behind the choice of printing technology.
Carter clearly believed that the Chinese would have adopted movable type
had they used an European-style writing system, for "Given similar conditions, the two ends of the world have done similar things" (Carter 1955, p.
242-43). To this vision of common humanity I am happy to subscribe.
43
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Appendix 1 Estimating cost parameters for pre‐industrial printing Block printing in China Start with the price of producing woodblocks. Chow (2004, p. 37) estimates the total cost in labour and materials of producing a 400‐characters page in woodblock at between 0.10 and 0.15 taels during the early modern period. As discussed in the text, low‐skill labour was remunerated at the rate of 1 tael per month or about 0.045 taels per day. Using the middle point of the interval estimated by Chow, a one page woodblock could be produced for 2.78 times the daily wage of unskilled labour. After woodblocks the next item in terms of importance was paper. Of course, different qualities were available, but the most popular type in commercial publishing was bamboo paper; which could be obtained at a cost of 0.026 taels per one hundred sheets (ibid, p. 35). To this should be added the cost of labour for printing copies and the cost of ink. Chow (2004, p. 45) gives a detailed example in which the total cost for bamboo paper, labour for printing and ink comes to 0.033 taels per one hundred pages. This implies a cost of paper, labour and ink equal to 0.0073 of the daily wage per printed page. Movable type in China In order to give movable type technology a fair chance of being adopted in China, I focus on a small‐scale printing firm with one single set of types. This does not correspond to the typical European printing firm, which would have several sets of types and possibly many printing presses (Febvre and Martin 1976, p.110). An estimate of the cost of a full set of types can be found in Heijdra (2004). For wooden types, he estimates that a set of 40,000 types, enough for a small commercial publisher, would cost 597 Spanish dollars in the early nineteen century. We do not have data on Chinese wages in Spanish dollars for this time period, but a comparison is possible by passing through an intermediate step. Heijdra (2004) also estimates the cost of producing woodblocks, including labour and materials, at 1 Spanish dollar per page. Given that we have estimated above that one woodblock page cost the equivalent of 2.78 days of low‐skill labour, and assuming that the technology for producing woodblocks did not change much between the 17th and 19th centuries, we can approximate the cost of a full set of wooden types in China at around 1,660 times the daily wage. Heijdra (2004) also estimates the cost of metal types at four times the cost of wooden types, or 6,640 times the daily wage for a set of 40,000 types. Next to this we need an estimate of the cost of text composition when using movable type. This was very high when using Chinese characters, and is estimated at 0.5 Spanish dollars per page by Heijdra (2004). This equals 1.39 times the daily wage for low‐skill labour using the same transformation as above. Finally, the cost of paper, ink and labour for printing is assumed the same as for block printing. Movable type in Europe Thanks to the punch and matrix process Europeans had access to much cheaper types (which were invariably made in metal). They also had to pay for a printing press, but even so their fixed costs were about an order of magnitude lower than in China. Febvre and Martin (1976, p.111) mention prices in the range of 20 to 30 livres for a full set of types in mid‐16th century France. A printing press would cost between 23 and 30 livres during the same period. Thus, 50 livres would have been enough to set up a small printing shop with one press and a full set of types. At that time, the wage of low‐skill labour in France was about 6 sols per day (ibid, p.132), with 20 sols making one livre. Thus, a printing press and a full set of metal types would cost the equivalent of 167 days of low‐skill labour. Similarly, composition was much easier with the small set of characters of European languages. Compositors in 16th century France were paid about 12 sols per day, and would produce between 1 and 3 full forms per day (ibid, p.131‐32). An aspect we have not discussed so far is that in Europe several pages were composed within one form and printed at the same time ‐ thus taking advantage of the larger surface that a printing press could cover as compared to the hand method employed in China. In Europe each form would have 4 pages of text in a folio format, 8 pages in a quarto format and 16 pages in an octavo format (ibid, p. 69). Assuming that the rate of 3 forms per day refers to the folio format, we can estimate the output of a text compositor at 12 pages per day. This implies a cost of text composition of 1 sol per page, or 0.17 of the daily wage of low‐skill labour which we have estimated at 6 sols. Finally, let us consider the one area where Europeans were at a disadvantage: the cost of paper. Paper was more expensive in Europe since it was produced from rags, which were always in short supply, as opposed to the large abundance of bamboo and other cheap materials in China. Chow (2004, p. 29) presents evidence that Dutch workers during the 16th century would have to sacrifice the wages of six to eight days to buy 500 sheets of paper, while the numbers cited above imply that Chinese workers could buy the same quantity with less than 3 days worth of wages. I use the middle point of Chow's interval (7 days of wages for 500 sheets of paper), which leads to a cost of paper equal to 0.0140 of the daily wage per printed page. Next to the cost of paper, other costs per printed page would appear negligible. The labour for operating the printing press was remunerated quite well: about 12 sols per day, or the same as compositors (Febvre and Martin 1976, p. 132). But for this wage they produced about 3'000 impressions per day, each impression consisting of at least 4 pages. Thus, printing labour would cost just 0.001 sol per page, or less than 0.0002 of the low‐skill daily wage. I round this to 0.0002 including ink costs. Finally, block printing is not observed in Europe but I provide an estimate of its likely cost by assuming that woodblocks would have been produced using the same technology as in China. The price of woodblocks in terms of low‐skill labour would then be the same. Appendix 2 Korea and the invention of Hangul In the history of printing, Korea occupies a place second only to China and the West. Korea imported block printing and movable type techniques from China shortly after their invention. Most impressive, Korea was the first country to develop movable type printing using metal types ‐‐ the invention of which is ascribed to the publication of a set of religious books in the year 1234, some 200 years after the invention of movable type in China. At this time, the Korean language was written using the Chinese logographic script. Of most interest to us, however, will be the subsequent invention of the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Hangul was invented by order of King Sejong of Korea around the year 1443 ‐‐ at any rate a document describing its use was published in 1446. Hangul is the main writing system in Korea today, and in its present form it counts 24 single letters and 27 digraphs (double letters where the shapes of the individual letters that forms them may have changed), for a total of 51 symbols. While 15th century Hangul had considerably more, we are still talking about a few dozen symbols. An interesting question is why the invention of this alphabet did not result in a development of movable type printing as seen in the West, first in Korea and then, by imitation, also in China? The reason is that writing with the Korean alphabet is not sequential, as in the West, but grouped in blocks, each block transcribing a syllable. As an example let us consider the one‐syllabe word “nat”, which is the Korean word for “day” and is formed by the three letters ㄴ (“n”), ㅏ (“a”) and ㅈ (“t”). “Nat” is not written ㄴㅏㅈ , as it would be in the West, it is written 낮 . The problem with this syllabic grouping is that letters change in size and shape according to which other letters they are combined with. Consider for instance the aspect of letter ㄴ (“n”), which is the initial letter in all four of the following Korean syllables: 나 , 냮 , 녹 , 뉈. In none of these examples is the letter ㄴequal in size and shape, so a standardized type for this letter would not do. Moreover, the process of combining irregular‐shaped letters into a syllabic block would be a far more challenging technical problem than the relatively straightforward task of assembling characters one after the other in Western typography. For all these reasons, movable type using Korean Hangul had to rely on the production of types for each individual syllable, not for each individual letter. There are 11,172 possible syllables in present‐
day Korean. While this total would be reduced by the fact that many of these possible syllables are not in actual use, it would also had to be increased for the larger number of symbols in early modern Hangul. In definitive, we are talking about a number of distinct types in the thousands ‐‐ not very different from what was needed for movable type printing using the Chinese logographic script. Indeed, Hangul was not invented for the purpose of rendering movable type printing less costly, which it did not, but for the purpose of facilitating the expansion of literacy. For this purpose it was perfectly suited, being much easier to learn than the Chinese script. As an aside, however, let me note that Hangul did not achieve this goal either. King Sejong was too far ahead of his time, and his successors did not share his enthusiasm for a literate people. Hangul was even banned in 1504, and it was only towards the end of the 19th century that it became the preferred writing system of Korea. One may still ask, I suppose, why China failed to invent a writing system based on an alphabet and sequential writing that would allow for standardisation in the production of types and thus lower costs in movable type printing. But that presupposes that the Chinese somehow knew that such a writing system would offer cost savings. That is highly dubious, given that the technique is not straightforward and the Chinese showed limited interest in learning from Westerners. Of even more importance is the fact that a change in a country's writing system could only be engineered by the state. While private entrepreneurs are always in the lookout for cost‐saving techniques, it is difficult to find any reason why the Chinese state would have wanted to implement such a massive change. King Sejong of Korea notwithstanding, the advancement of literacy and the acquisition of books among the general population were of no interest for early modern monarchs. If anything, such changes could be a nuisance if they were to put strange ideas in the heads of peasants and servants. In short, the Chinese state never thought about changing the Chinese logographic script because, as it was, it served its needs very well. Table 1
Costs of printing in early modern China and Europe
Item
Cost
(in days of low-skill labour)
Cost
(in US dollars of 1990)
2.78 per page
$ 15.98 per page
0.0073 per page
$ 0.042 per page
0.0058 per page
0.0015 per page
$ 0.033 per page
$ 0.009 per page
1,660 per set
(wooden types)
$ 9,543 per set
(wooden types)
1.39 per page
$ 7.99 per page
as above
as above
167 per set
$ 1,056 per set
0.17 per page
$ 1.07 per page
α (production of copies)
0.0142 per page
$ 0.090 per page
of which:
- paper
- labour and ink
0.0140 per page
0.0002 per page
$ 0.088 per page
$ 0.002 per page
2.78 per page
$ 17.58 per page
as above
as above
Block Printing in China
β b (woodblocks)
α (production of copies)
of which:
- paper
- labour and ink
Movable type in China
F (full set of types)
β m (text composition)
α (production of copies)
Movable type in Europe
F (full set of types and printing
press)
β m (text composition)
Block Printing in Europe (assumed)
β b (woodblocks)
α (production of copies)
See Appendix 1 for sources and construction.
Table 2
Empirical estimates of the demand for books
Study
Hjorth-Andersen
(2000)
Country and period
Denmark, 1973-1993
Income elasticity
1.31 to 1.97
Price elasticity
-1.34 to -1.44
Prieto-Rodriguez et al.
(2005)
Spain, 1985-1995
1.37
-1.65
Ringstad and Loyland
(2006)
Norway, 1986-1999
1.30 to 1.84
-1.59 to -2.91
Table 3
Urban populations in China and Europe, year 1600
China
Total Population
Urban Population
Urban share
Largest cities (population)
Number of cities with a
population of 40,000 or more
Source: Nunn and Qian (2011).
160 million
2.568 million
1.61 %
Europe
(including Russia)
102 million
2.592 million
2.55 %
Beijing (706,000)
Hangchow (270,000)
Nanking (194,000)
Canton (180,000)
Sian (138,000)
Paris (245,000)
Naples (224,000)
London (187,000)
Venice (151,000)
Prague (110,000)
18
26
Figure 1
Choice of printing technology in China and Europe
25000
20000
15000
10000
Profits Movable Type
Profits Block Printing
China
5000
Europe
(in $ of 1990)
0
0
40
80
120 160 200 240 280 320 360 400 440 480 520 560 600 640 680 720 760 800
-5000
-10000
-15000
Local Population (in 1,000s)
Figure 2
Number of book titles and local population, Europe
80
74.5
70
67.75
60.75
60
53.75
50
46.75
39.5
Book Titles 40
Movable type
32.25
Block printing
30
25
20
17.25
9.5
10
0 0
1
1.75
2.25
3
3.5
4.25
4.75
5.5
6
6.5
0
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
Local Population (in 1,000s)
140
160
180
200
Figure 3
Number of book titles and local population, China
80
70
60
50
Book Titles 40
Movable type
Block printing
30
20
10
0 0
1.5 1
2.751.75
0
20
40
4
6
5
2.25
3
3.5
7.25
4.25
8.25
4.75
9.25
5.5
11.25
10.25
6
6.5
0
60
80
100
120
Local Population (in 1,000s)
140
160
180
200