Measuring Ancient Inequality

By Branko Milanovic, P. Lindert, Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2007

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using what are known as social tables, stretching from the Roman Empire 14 AD, to Byzantium in 1000, to England in 1688, to Nueva Espana around 1790, to China in 1880 and to British India in 1947. It applies two new concepts in making those assessments - what the authors call the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. Rather than simply offering measures of actual inequality, the authors compare the latter with the maximum feasible inequality (or surplus) that could have been extracted by the elite. The results, especially when compared with modern poor countries, give new insights in to the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05ed14a84ef24ad81a866b9b5571f85fb57c8dd0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Jan Luiten van Zanden
2. Jorg Baten
3. B. V. Leeuwen
4. P. Földvári
5. Branko Milanovic

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Jan Luiten van Zanden
2. Jorg Baten
3. Branko Milanovic

Citations in the corpus

• The Changing Shape of Global Inequality 1820–2000; Exploring a New Dataset (2014, methodology): “Both methods draw heavily on the concept of the extraction rate (Milanovic et al. 2007).”