Social Science Seminar - Brain Gain in Late Colonial Indonesia: New Evidence on Chinese Migration and Wages
Supporting the below United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:支持以下聯合國可持續發展目標：支持以下联合国可持续发展目标：
During the “Age of Mass Migration”, many Chinese migrants came to colonial Indonesia. We propose that these migratory flows included many skilled workers, contrary to the belief that they mostly consisted of unskilled labourers. We construct a new dataset of migration and potential surplus earnings for different types of work for the period ca. 1900-1920. Our analyses show that high earnings for skilled work, but not for unskilled work, strongly incentivized migration. Given the scarcity of skilled labour in Indonesia, the skilled migrants may have significantly contributed to economic growth in general and the growing trade-based sectors in particular.
Mark Hup is a Research Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Department of Economics. He is an applied economist specializing in economic history, public economics, and development. His main strand of research focuses on the impacts of trade shocks and state capacity on fiscal modernization, a key aspect of long-run development. Specifically, he studies the transition from in-kind taxation to monetary taxation and asks how and why money-based and centralized fiscal institutions emerged. Beyond this strand of research, he also studies migration, the effects of commodity production on the skill premium, the economic consequences of coercion, and the role of monetary policy risk in financial markets.
Host: Prof Wen WANG, Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science, HKUST