Four great Asian trade collapses

This paper introduces a new dataset of commodity-specific, bilateral import data for four large Asian economies in the interwar period: China, Dutch East Indies, India and Japan. It uses these to describe trade collapses concerned. These resembled post-2008 Great Trade Collapse some respects but not others: they occurred along intensive margin, imports cars were particularly badly affected, durable goods fell by more than those non-durables, except China which rapidly industrialising. On other hand declines geographically imbalanced, while prices important quantities driving overall collapse.