The following are Peter Lindert’s estimates of countries’ abilities to purchase a “barebones” subsistence bundle of goods, relative to Britain in the same year.
For benchmark years in which a country’s data have yielded a plausible estimate of nominal GDP per person, the measure of relative purchasing power (PP) is a double ratio. The numerator ratio equals that country’s GDP per capita divided by the cost a subsistence bundle of goods delivering about 1,942 calories and about 82 grams of protein a day, plus a few simple non-foods such as cloth or candles or lamp oil. The denominator ratio is the same thing for Britain, drawing on the Broadberry et al. book (2015) and on Clark’s English prices downloadable from this website. “Britain” here means England and Wales up to 1700, then Great Britain to 1870, and then the United Kingdom.
The estimation sources and details are given in the files below. The results are presented in Peter H. Lindert, “Purchasing Power Disparity before 1914,” NBER working paper 22896 (December 2016). This working paper will also be available as a gpih working paper on this same site in summer 2017. An earlier version of the working paper is “Purchasing Power Disparity: Who Could consume More before 1914?”, Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study Discussion Paper HIAS-E-35 (October 2016).
In what follows, “PP” = relative purchasing power, this country vs Britain, and “p&w” = price and wage data.
Australia NSWales food p&w 1818-1983, and Australia v Britain PP 1868
South Africa, Cape Colony p&w 1653-1913, and Cape Colony v Britain 1861
China v Britain 1840 and 1885
India v Britain 1595-1600
India v Britain 1870
Japan v Britain 1601-2010
Java v Britain 1820-1910
Krakow & Poland v Britain 1578
Mexico & Peru v Britain 1800
Western Europe v Britain 1500-1913
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