for prof washington only

ECON 321 SPRING 2017:

INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT 6 DUE FEBRUARY 22nd, 2017 BY THE START OF CLASS

Name SAMPLE

Student Number ANSWER

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

such a way that the TA or instructor can look them up.

Name or Signature for Honor Code: ______________________________________________

The table below is for TA use only.

1 a /12

b /2

2

a /4

b /4

c /2

d /4

3 a /14

Total /42

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1. [Reading] Read The Economic Cost of Racism to Chinese-Canadians.

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) No sample answer for this part.

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. (2 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? No sample answer for this part. Before answering the question, you may wish to ask yourself – in the absence of the racism described in the paper, how would the resource allocation decisions of Chinese-Canadians have been different? Would they have spent their time differently (leisure, education, work)? Invested differently (different industries, using different sources of capital, studying in different fields)? How would Canada’s economic history and current economy be different?

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2. [‘Raphing] 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?” 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.) (4 marks)

No full sample answer, but consider the following (fictional) fee information: Fee A: $100 from 1910 to 1915 Fee B: $200 from 1912 to 1917 The total fees would be 1910: $100 1911: $100 1912: $100 + $200 = $300 1913: $100 + $200 = $300 1914: $100 + $200 = $300 1915: $100 + $200 = $300 1916: $200 1917: $200

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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. (4 marks)

No full sample answer, but it boils down to the following: You WANT Silver Ounces / Year You HAVE

• Copper Wen / Day

• 365 Days / Year

• Copper Wen / Silver Tael

• 4/3 Silver Taels / Silver Ounces Combine the information in the bullet points above to get Silver Ounces / Year Remember that if you WANT W/Z, but only have W/X, Y/X and Y/Z, you can treat the units as you would treat fractions:

𝑊

𝑍 = 𝑊

𝑋 ×

1

( 𝑌 𝑋 ) × 𝑌

𝑍 = 𝑊

𝑋 × 𝑋

𝑌 × 𝑌

𝑍 = 𝑊

𝑍 × 𝑋

𝑋 × 𝑌

𝑌 = 𝑊

𝑍 ×1×1

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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. dollar1, so we can use U.S. data. 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. (2 marks) No full sample answer, but you WANT Dollars / Year and you have

▪ Silver Ounces / Year ▪ 20.67 Dollars / Gold Ounce ▪ (Dollars / Gold Ounce) / (Dollars / Silver Ounce)

1 “Canadian bank notes, denominated in dollars, were … widely accepted and circulated freely in the United States.” (Powell, p. 19)

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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.) (4 marks) No full sample answer. By now you should be familiar with how to create a line graph. If not, please refer to earlier sample answers. Keep in mind you are NOT plotting Dollars/Year on the line graph. You are plotting the number of years it takes to pay the fees calculated in Part a. In terms of units, you WANT Years, and you have

▪ Dollars (Fee from Part a) ▪ Dollars/Year (From part c)

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3. [Research] UVic hosts an important collection of Chinese-Canadian documents, mostly donated by the Chinese Collective Benevolent Association (CCBA, founded 1884). This question asks you to perform some independent research into changing conditions between the founding of the CCBA and the start of the Chinese Exclusion period, in 1923.

a. Go to UVic’s Chinese Canadian digital archive search page, and enter ‘economic conditions’ in the search bar. This should yield 7 results. Read through at least three of these sources, most of which are extremely short. Based on what you have read, explain how economic conditions changed for Chinese immigrants in Victoria between 1884 and 1922. (e.g. Did they move away from agriculture and into manufacturing jobs? Did they own less land than before? Did any jobs appear/disappear, or become more/less important over time?) Use properly-cited quotes from your 3 (or more) sources, including a URL that leads directly to the source, as part of your argument. (8 marks for your argument, 6 marks for appropriate use and citation of at least 3 sources.)

Note: If a document has more than one page, you can click on the individual pages in the right-hand pane to see that page’s transcript or translation.

No full sample answer, but keep the hints given in mind.

For an example of citation, the following passage (not relevant for the question asked) uses a figure and a quote from the same document.

Around 1895, members of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) donated $2,200 to Tung Wah hospital in Hong Kong. Contributors expected to have their names listed in the hospital’s Commemoration Book, but it was too late to do so for the current year. Instead, the hospital promised their names would “be listed in a notice to be soon published” (Tung Wah Hospital (1895?)).

Source:

Tung Wah Hospital（东华医院), “Letter about contribution to Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong

(东华医院感谢维多利亚华人捐款的信),” August 5th, 1895?, Document 1977-084.1.7.4, Chinese-Canadian Collection, University of Victoria Archives. Digitized document and English translation last accessed on February 12th, 2017 at

http://contentdm.library.uvic.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/collection2/id/119/rec/2