讲座人：资源，日内瓦国际关系与发展学院

讲座时间：2025年12月31日上午10:30-12:00

讲座地点：北京大学国家发展研究院承泽园校区245教室

讲座题目：A Thirst for Silver: Trade Disruption, Silver Shortage, and the Institutional Causes of Unrest in Nineteenth-Century China

内容简介：We provide new evidence that rigid trade and taxation systems, combined with a global decline in silver production triggered by the Spanish American wars of independence, fueled social instability in early nineteenth-century Qing China. Drawing on newly assembled county-level panel data and historical commercial routes, we show that regions farther from Canton—the empire’s sole legal international port—faced sharper silver price increases and higher conflict incidence after the silver shock. We argue that silver taxation was central to this relationship: because taxes were fixed in silver, price increases raised the real tax burden and heightened the risk of unrest. Quantitative estimates indicate that the global silver shock lowered China’s aggregate welfare by 1.1%, with taxation accounting for most of the loss. Counterfactual analysis suggests that opening additional international ports would have made the negative impacts more uneven across regions and hence more politically destabilizing, though the effect was limited. By contrast, fiscal reform emerges as a more critical policy lever for mitigating the adverse consequences of the silver shock.

主讲人简介：Yuan Zi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. She is a research affiliate of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and a research associate at the University of Oslo. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Geography and China Economic Review. Her research interests include international trade and economic development, with a special focus on production networks, trade and labor market interactions, and firms in international trade. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, and International Economic Review.

组织者：

（国家发展研究院 ）李力行、席天扬、徐化愚、于航、王轩、易君健、黄清扬

（经济学院）刘冲、吴群峰、曹光宇、年永威

（光华管理学院）张晓波、仇心诚