The demand for silk: an analysis by country

Why is an analysis by country necessary? The discussion in the previous chapter has dealt with world trends, using whatever country evidence was available to illustrate them. This basic approach has to be supplemented by a country analysis because each major consuming country used a different mix of silks, as table 5.1 demonstrates. Exports were similarly concentrated. In 1908–13 the United States absorbed 70 per cent of the Japanese exports, France 50 per cent of the Cantonese (there are no data on exports from Shanghai by country) and Germany and Switzerland 60 per cent of the Italian ones. In other words, there was a sort of biunique relationship between the producers and consumers of silk – between Japan and the United States, China and France, and Germany (and Switzerland) and Italy. These relations are of interest to the analysis because the different growth in the major countries caused the world distribution of silk consumption to change substantially (table 5.2). The effect of the different growth rates in the consuming countries can be estimated by the so-called country effect in a constant-market share analysis. It is measured by computing the quantity of silk each producing country would have exported if its share in all markets had remained constant. The difference between this estimate and the actual exports, called residual, measures the changes in the producers’ share of each market – that is, their competitiveness. The results for the silk market since 1894 (in previous years some data are missing) are set out in table 5.3.