the economics history of Canada

2

ECON 321 SUMMER 2018: INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT 4 DUE JUNE 15th, 2018 BY 11:55 PM

Name
Student Number[footnoteRef:1] [1: If you wish, you may fill in only the last 3 digits of your Student Number. We use this to identify students whose name does not match the name on Coursespaces.]
Group Name

Honor Code: I guarantee that all the answers in this assignment, except those for the question specifically marked as a group discussion question, are entirely my own work. I have cited any outside sources that I used to create these answers in APA style.

Name or Signature for Honor Code: ______________________________________________

The table below is for TA use only.

1	a		/12
	b		/3
2	d		/15
Total		/30

1. [Reading] Read the following paper:

Li, P. S. (1987). The Economic Cost of Racism to Chinese-Canadians. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 19(3), 102 – 113. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1293156009

a. Write a 3-2-1 report on the paper above. Remember that you CAN’T just copy-and-paste text from the paper. You need to either cite quotes properly, and explain why you chose them, or use your own words. (12 marks)

b. The author of the article, Peter S. Li, is a sociologist, not an economist, and uses the phrase ‘economic cost’ differently than an economist would. Use your economic training and what you have learned in the article to briefly describe what the economic cost of racism is to Chinese-Canadians. You must refer to evidence in the article in order to receive full marks. (3 marks)

Hint: Remember that economics studies the allocation of limited resources among unlimited needs and wants. How does racism influence the allocation of resources by Chinese-Canadians? What cost does this changed allocation imposed, compared to a world with no racism?

2. [‘Raphing] [Group Discussion Question] Chinese immigrants came to Victoria looking for, among other things, a better income than the one they could earn in China. However, on arriving in Canada they would have faced a number of fees and taxes in their first year.

In this question, you will use available historical sources to answer the question, ‘How many years of working in China would it take to pay the fees faced by Chinese immigrants in their first year in Victoria?”

While you are expected to follow all the steps and show your work marks will only be given based on the final, completed graph. This is to allow the assignments to be marked in a timely fashion.

You DO need to show your work in order to receive a non-zero mark.

· Answered the question using Excel? Include the spreadsheet with your calculations.

· Answered the question by hand? Submit a sample calculation for ONE year for each step, so we know that you know how to do them. (Handing in ALL the calculations would take too much space.)

You will be given a large amount of data. If performing the calculations by hand, please use only the first ten years (1878 – 1888, inclusive). If you are using Excel, please use the whole data set.

a. The first step is to calculate the total fees and taxes a new immigrant could expect to pay each year. Use the data in the appendix to calculate the total yearly fee by adding up all the individual fees and taxes present in a given year. (This list is NOT comprehensive, so we’re under-estimating the actual burden on immigrants.)

b. Now it’s time to find out how much an average worker in China earned at that time. The good news is that in 2011, Robert C. Allen et al. published a series of wages for rural workers near Beijing from 1807 to 1902. The bad news is that it’s not in dollars per year, and we need to convert it into dollars per year in order to perform our calculations.

Allen et al. have daily wage data, in copper ‘cash’ (or wen, 文). At the time, China was on a silver standard – its currency was backed by silver. Allen et al. also provide information on how may copper wen are in a silver tael (两). A tael weighs about 4/3 (1.33) ounces.

Use this information, and the assumption that a year has 365 days, to calculate the yearly wage of a Chinese agricultural worker, in ounces of silver.

c. Next, we need to turn the yearly wage in silver ounces to a yearly wage in dollars. For the time period we’re looking at, British Columbia was essentially using the U.S. dollar[footnoteRef:2], so we can use U.S. data. [2: “Canadian bank notes, denominated in dollars, were … widely accepted and circulated freely in the United States.” (Powell, p. 19)]

We don’t have the price in dollars of an ounce of silver, but we can build it from two other pieces of information we DO have: the official US price of an ounce of gold, in dollars, and gold/silver price ratio: that is, how many ounces of silver were equal in value to one ounce of gold.

Since the US was on a stable gold standard, one ounce of gold was worth exactly $20.67 throughout our entire period. The gold/silver price ratio (ounces of silver/ounces of gold) was obtained from MeasuringWorth and is provided in the Data Appendix.

Use the information above to calculate the yearly wage of a Chinese agricultural worker, in dollars.

d. It’s finally time to put it all together and create our graph. Divide the Total Yearly Fee from part a. by the Yearly Agricultural Dollar Wage in part b. to find how many years of working in China it would take to pay the first year of fees faced by Chinese immigrants to Victoria. Plot this series as a line graph with well-labeled axes. The vertical axis should be ‘Years to Pay Fees’ and the horizontal axis should be ‘Year’. (Remember: if you’re doing this by hand, you only need the years 1878 – 1888. Otherwise, your graph should cover 1878 to 1902.) (15 marks)

References

Question 1

Li, P. S. (1987). The Economic Cost of Racism to Chinese-Canadians. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 19(3), 102 – 113. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1293156009

Question 2

Municipal Police Court. (1880, May 1). Daily Colonist, p. 3. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist18800501uvic/18800501#page/n2/mode/1up/

Dominion of Canada. (1888). Copy of Imperial Order in Council, The Court at Windsor Castle, the 3rd Day of April, 1886 in Sessional Papers, Volume 16, Second Session of the Sixth Parliament of the Dominion of Canada. Ottawa: A. Senecal. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=mAIxAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA268&lpg=PA268

Lai, D. C. (2010). Chinese Community Leadership: Case Study of Victoria in Canada. Canada: World Scientific Publishing.

Li, P. S. (1979). A historical approach to ethnic stratification: the case of the Chinese in Canada, 1858 – 1930. Canadian Review of Sociology, 16(3), 320 – 332. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-618X.1979.tb01034.x/abstract

Allen, R. C., Bassino, J.-P., Ma, D., Moll-Murata, C. & Van Zanden, J. L. (2011). Wages, prices and living standards in China, 1738 – 1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India. The Economic History Review, 64(S1), 8 – 38. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27919531

Powell, J. (2005). A History of the Canadian Dollar. Canada: Bank of Canada. Retrieved from http://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/dollar_book.pdf

Officer, L. H. & Williamson, S. H. (2017). The Price of Gold, 1257 – Present [Web Page]. Retrieved from http://www.measuringworth.com/gold/

Data Appendix

This data is also available as an Excel file.

Question 2.a. Details of Fees

Fee Name	Imposed By	Year(s) (Inclusive)	Expected $/Year	Source
Chinese Tax	City of Victoria	1878	$10	Lai (2010)
Chinese Tax	City of Victoria	1879	$30	Lai (2010)
Cubic Air Bylaw	City of Victoria	1880 - 1884	$5	Daily Colonist (1880)
Cubic Air Bylaw	City of Victoria	1885 - 1893	$10	Lai (2010)
Chinese Population Regulation	British Columbia	1884 - 1885	$10	Lai (2010), Dominion of Canada (1888)
Foundation Fee	CCBA[footnoteRef:3] [3: Victoria Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (域多利中华会馆)]	1884 - 1902	$2	Lai (2010)
Head Tax	Canada (Federal)	1885 - 1899	$50	Li (1979)
Chinese Hospital Fee	CCBA	1899 - 1902	$2	Lai (2010)
Head Tax	Canada (Federal)	1900 - 1902	$100	Li (1979)

Question 2.b. Daily Rural Wages near Beijing and copper wen per silver tael

Rural Beijing Daily Wages (Allen et al., 2011, Table A.1)
Year	Copper Wen, 文	Copper Wen per Silver Tael (两)
1878	348	8,314
1879	375	8,342
1880	410	8,510
1881	401	8,341
1882	394[footnoteRef:4] [4: Figures in bold were missing in the original, and have been estimated via linear interpolation.]	7,748
1883	387	7,154
1884	356	6,722
1885	395	7,573
1886	402	6,950
1887	395	7,024
1888	361	7,883
1889	421	7,314
1890	393	7,254
1891	390	7,627
1892	372	7,651
1893	410	7,212
1894	443	6,722
1895	446	6,612
1896	448	6,501
1897	442	6,204
1898	435	5,907
1899	429	5,609
1900	422	5,312
1901	462	5,758
1902	470	6,079

Notes:

1 Tael weights 4/3 (~1.33) Ounces.

1 Year has 365 Days (for the purpose of this question)

Question 2.c. Gold/Silver Price Ratio

Gold/Silver Price Ratio (MeasuringWorth)
Year	ounces of silver / 1 ounce of gold
1878	17.92
1879	18.39
1880	18.05
1881	18.25
1882	18.20
1883	18.64
1884	18.61
1885	19.41
1886	20.78
1887	21.10
1888	22.00
1889	22.10
1890	19.75
1891	20.92
1892	23.72
1893	26.49
1894	32.56
1895	31.60
1896	30.59
1897	34.20
1898	35.03
1899	34.36
1900	33.33
1901	34.68
1902	39.15

Note:

You may assume that during this entire period, 1 ounce of gold was worth $20.67.