History matters: the effects of Chinese ports from 170 years ago on entrepreneurship today

ABSTRACT

Mounting evidence suggests that current regional entrepreneurship can be explained largely by historical entrepreneurship. Our research shows, however, that entrepreneurship can be fostered by historical events, such as the establishment of ports in China in 1842, which at the time were based mainly on agriculture. Moreover, historical entrepreneurship may even have originated from these historical events. By altering regional entrepreneurial culture, human capital and the transportation system, historical ports that opened up to 170 years ago can significantly predict current regional entrepreneurship. We strengthen our conclusion by mitigating the potential selection bias of historical ports and introducing several robustness tests.

KEYWORDS:

• entrepreneurship
• historical port
• entrepreneurial culture
• persistence
• China

JEL:

• L26
• N95
• R12

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are indebted to two anonymous referees, and the associate editor, Michael Fritsch, whose comments and suggestions were very helpful in improving this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Modern China is generally acknowledged as being the period between the First Opium War, which started in 1840, to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, when China experienced several significant historic transformations.

2. The highest literary title a person could achieve during the Qing dynasty.

3. The Qing Empire ended in 1912. Subsequently, only five historical ports were opened and existed briefly during the period 1912–48. Thus, we restrict our sample to historical ports opened before 1912. We find that the results are robust even after we expand our target period to 1948. Host cities of historical ports not located in mainland China were excluded.

4. HK. is the abbreviation of Haikwan, indicating the custom in Chinese. Tls is the legal currency unit in the Qing dynasty. According to Wu (2015), 1 HK.Tls = US$0.50–1.50.

5. During the Anti-Japanese War (1937–45), 10 Chinese provinces reported negative population growth. Thus, we limit our sample to the provinces of Yunnan, Henan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Guangdong, Xinjiang, Sichuan, Henan, Zhejiang and Anhui.

6. These data are the earliest we obtained for this indicator and which can reflect conditions at the start of the reform and opening up.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project [grant number 2018BJB018]; the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Funding Projects [grant numbers 2020110574, 2020110516, 2020110082 and 2019110273); and the Yonyou Foundation Project [grant number 2018Y09].