| 抄録・内容（英） | Under the wartime economy, substantial amounts of public bonds are issued to fund military expenditures, and large amounts of money flow into the market. In addition, production resources are transferred from peacetime industries to munition industries, and a supply shortage occurs in the general consumer product industries. Therefore, there are an upward trend in the price level in the consumer product industries as well as in the munitions industries. However, there are some reasons why a rising price level must be controlled under wartime economy. First, a rising price level expands the financial budget of the government. Second, as a rising price makes it difficult to export of products, the import of production resources must be limited. Third, a rising price level makes a major impact on people's lives. Therefore, to control the price level is a particularly important issue in a wartime economy. Japan's path to World War II began with the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. At first, according to the optimistic expectation that the war would end in a short period of time, price control was mainly conducted by the indirect measures such as avoiding the deterioration of the relationship between supply and demand. However, as the war continued, indirect price control measures could no longer be sufficiently effective, and this led to open the doors to direct price control that started with a crackdown of excessive profit. Then, following the establishment of "voluntary" price ceilings within industries, official prices were imposed for individual goods. Subsequently, the prices of all goods were frozen at their existing levels on the designated date. The imposition of official prices halted the one side of the operation of price mechanism, i.e. price fluctuations in response to changes in market supply and demand. However, the other side of the operation of price mechanism, i.e. fluctuations of supply and demand based on the fixed official prices, was not completely halted. Production shifted toward goods with higher official prices, and in the goods with lower official prices, the amount of production was reduced, which led to further price increases. Eventually, the differences between higher import prices of production resources and the lower prices of final domestic products were offset with government subsidies, and financial incentives were prepared for increase of production. Thus, measures to adjust production volumes by setting official prices were sought. We review the history of price control by the Japanese government over a period of eight years from 1937 to 1945. Moreover, we confirm the difficulty of price control, that is, the robustness of the price mechanism. |
