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Oriental Competition in World Trade

By John E. Orchard
July 1937
Article Summary and Author Biography

JOHN E. ORCHARD, Associate Professor of Economic Geography, Columbia University; author of "Japan's Economic Position"

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THE rapid expansion of Japan's export trade cannot be dismissed as a temporary phenomenon. It is a part of a major development in the Orient that seems destined to disturb to an even greater degree than at present the economic equilibrium of the leading industrial and commercial nations. It is based upon the more effective utilization of cheap labor, Japan's principal resource for industrialization. It involves a conflict of widely contrasting standards of living. It may foreshadow important shifts in the direction of international trade.

I. ORIENTAL COMPETITION AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

To understand its full implications, Japanese competition must be viewed in its historical setting in the long commercial intercourse of East and West. The present is not the first occasion when Oriental goods produced by cheap labor have entered world markets with disturbing results. An examination of the economic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals that Oriental competition was one of the more powerful economic forces of that period. There is abundant evidence that it was an important contributing factor in stimulating the invention of the various labor-saving devices that constituted the Industrial Revolution...

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