Wages, prices, and living standards in China, 1738-1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India

By Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, C. Moll-Murata, Jan Luiten van Zanden. 2009

537 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe but far behind that in the leading economies in north-western Europe. Real wages stagnated in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, with little cumulative change for 200 years. The income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long-run stagnation in China combined with industrialization in Japan and Europe.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/080a4ae5de62cb97606410ae5429bb876d2ce850

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Citations in the corpus

Seven Centuries of European Economic Growth and Decline (2015, background): “From a very long-run perspective there has been a great deal of debate about the Great Divergence, when European economies overtook Asian economies like China over the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Pomeranz 2000; Broadberry and Gupta 2006; Allen et al. 2011; Broadberry 2013).”
China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850 (2017, unknown): “authors such as Pomeranz (2011) and from economic historians using other quantitative indicators such as real wages and urbanization rates (Broadberry and Gupta 2006; Allen et al. 2011).”
Between conquest and independence: Real wages and demographic change in Spanish America, 1530–1820 (2012, methodology): “Research on Latin American prices and wages has been relative scarce compared with other regions, in particular Europe.”
The Colonial Origins of the Divergence in the Americas: A Labor Market Approach (2012, methodology): “8 Our cost of living index is the cost of the subsistence basket and its counterparts in other parts of the world [Allen, 2001; Allen et al., 2011].”