Links and abstracts for these working papers appear below, after the initial list. All working papers are in PDF format. If you do not have Adobe Reader, click here.
GPIH Working Paper No. 1. Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738-1925.
GPIH Working Paper No. 2, Jean-Pascal Bassino and Debin Ma, Japanese Unskilled Wages in International Perspective, 1741-1913.
GPIH Working Paper No. 3, Phillip Hoffman, Why Is It That Europeans Ended Up Conquering the Rest of the Globe? Prices, the Military Revolution, and Western Europe’s Comparative Advantage in Violence
GPIH Working Paper No. 4, Kyoji Fukao, Debin Ma, and Tangjun Yuan. Real GDP in Pre-War East Asia: A 1934-36 Benchmark Purchasing Power Parity Comparison with the U.S.
GPIH Working Paper No. 5, Gregory Clark and David Jacks. Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1869
GPIH Working Paper No. 6, Peter H. Lindert. Long-run Trends in American Farmland Values.
GPIH Working Paper No. 7, Robert C. Allen. How Prosperous were the Romans? Evidence from Diocletian's Price Edict (301 AD).
GPIH Working Paper No. 8, Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Measuring Ancient Inequality.
GPIH Working Paper No. 9, Gregory Clark. The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1209-2004.
GPIH Working Paper No. 10, Metin M. Cosgel. Agricultural Productivity in the Early Ottoman Empire.
GPIH Working Paper No. 11, Se Yan. Real Wages and Skill Premia in China, 1858-1936 Evidence from the China Maritime Customs Archives.
- Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe,
1738-1925
GPIH Working Paper No. 1, Version: October 2005
Abstract
The paper develops data on the history of wages and prices in China from the
eighteenth century to the twentieth. These data are used to compare Beijing and
Canton to leading cities in Europe and Japan 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 and far behind that of workers in the leading economies in northwestern
Europe. Industrialization led to rising real wages in Europe and Japan. Real wages
declined in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth. There was little cumulative change in the
standard of living of workers in Beijing and Canton for two hundred years. The
income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long run stagnation in
China combined with economic development in Japan and Europe.
GPIH Working Paper No. 2, Version: November 2005. Forthcoming in Research in Economic History, 2005
Abstract
Constructing consumption baskets for the benchmark periods of 1745-54 and
1882-86, and price indices, we calculate real wage series for Japanese unskilled
daily laborers in 1741-1913. Matching caloric and protein contents in our Japanese
consumption baskets with those in European baskets, we compare Japanese and
European urban real wages. Real wage rates in Kyoto and later Tokyo are about a
third London wages but comparable to wages in major Southern and Central
European cities for the 1700-1900; second, there is a substantial surge in real wages
in the Meiji period over that of the Tokugawa period. These findings have
implications for the debate on conditions in Europe and Asia on the eve of the
industrial revolution .
GPIH Working Paper No. 3, Version: January 2006.
Abstract
Preliminary data from England, France, and Germany show that the relative price
of artillery, handguns, and gunpowder declined between the fourteenth century
and the eighteenth century. Most of these prices fell relative to the cost of factors
of production, and the price decline suggests that the military sector of western
European economies experienced rapid and sustained technical change before the
Industrial Revolution–a claim in accord with qualitative evidence from research
on the late medieval and early modern military revolution. The price data shed
new light on this revolution and point to a potential explanation for why western
Europe developed a comparative advantage in violence over the rest of the world.
GPIH Working Paper No. 4, Version: February 2007.
Abstract
This article provides estimates of purchasing power parity (PPP) converters for expenditure side GDP of Japan/China, Japan/U.S and China/US through a detailed matching of prices for more than 50 types of goods and services in private consumption and about 20 items or sectors for investment and government expenditure. Linking with the earlier studies on the price levels of Taiwan and Korea relative to Japan, we derive the mid-1930s benchmark PPP adjusted per capita income of Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea at 32%, 11%, 23%, and 12% of the U.S. level respectively. These estimates corrected the consistent downward bias in East Asian income levels based on market exchange rate conversions. Compared with Angus Maddison’s estimates based on the 1990 benchmark back-projection, our current-price based result are 18% and 44% lower for Japan and Korea and 4% and 10% higher for Taiwan and China respectively in the mid-1930s. We develop a preliminary theoretical and empirical framework to examine the possible source of the biases in the back-projection method. The article ends with a discussion on historical implications of our findings on the initial conditions and long-term growth dynamics in East Asia
GPIH Working Paper No. 5, Version: April 2006, published in European Review of Economic History 11, 1 (April 2007): 39-72.
Abstract
How important was coal to the Industrial Revolution? Despite the huge
growth of output, and the grip of coal and steam on the popular image of
the Industrial Revolution, recent cliometric accounts have assumed coal
mining mattered little to the Industrial Revolution. In contrast both E. A.
Wrigley and Kenneth Pomeranz have made coal central to the story. This
paper constructs new series on coal rents, the price of coal at pithead and at
market, and the price of firewood, and uses them to examine this issue. We
conclude coal output expanded in the Industrial Revolution mainly as a
result of increased demand rather than technological innovations in mining.
But that expansion could have occurred at any time before 1760. Further
our coal rents series suggests that English possession of coal reserves made
a negligible contribution to Industrial Revolution incomes.
GPIH Working Paper No. 6, Version: February 1988, published in Agricultural History Center Working Papers Series no.45.
Abstract
The long history of U.S. farmland prices shows some striking reversals, with the latest being the worst. The boom and bust cycle since 1973 has been as unstable as any earlier era of ten years or more. Its land-value instability matches that of the Civil War disruption, and is far worse than those in either the famous speculative cycle peaking in 1920 or the Great Depression of the 1930s. The interwar movements in fact reveal a single long downward slide in real land farmland values from 1914 to 1942, not the popular alternation of booms and busts. Each of these conclusions is supported by the twentieth-century behavior of rents and the ex-post rate of return on farm land, as well as by the movements in its purchase value.
These movements were "real" in every sense. They showed up in real, not just nominal, values. They were genuine price movements, not movements in the quality of land. And they were shared by all the regions of the United States, despite a few interesting regional variations.
The trends throw new light on two issues in the history of American capital accumulation. Incorporating market-perceived capital gains and losses on farm land into measures of savings starts to re-shape the contours of the famous rise and fall of American savings. The attractions of farm land as an asset may also help explain the lower capital intensity of the American than the British economy in the middle of the last century.
A final section of the paper makes initial progress toward explaining the striking movements in farmland values and rents since the early nineteenth century. It explores the roles of several forces, finding a general pattern: those changes that historically raised the price of farm land were, with only one exception, changes that must have harmed the advance of wages and average national income.
GPIH Working Paper No. 7, Version: September 2007. Oxford University, Department of Economics Working Paper no. 363 (September 2007).
The paper compares the standard of living of labourers in the Roman Empire in 301 AD with the standard of living of labourers in Europe and Asia from the middle ages to the industrial revolution. Roman data are drawn from Diocletian’s Price Edict. The real wage of Roman workers was like that of their counterparts in the lagging parts of Europe and much of Asia in the middle of the eighteenth century. Roman workers earned just enough to buy a minimal subsistence consumption basket. Real wages were considerably higher in the advanced parts of Europe in the eighteenth century, as they had been in Europe generally following the Black Death in 1348-9.
GPIH Working Paper No. 8, Version: November 2007. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 13550 (November 2007).
[See also its appendix data files downloadable here at GPIH website, in the “early income distributions” page.]
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 España around 1790, to China in 1880 and to British India in 1947. It applies two new concepts in making those assessments -- what we call the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. Rather than simply offering measures of actual inequality, we 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.
GPIH Working Paper No. 11, Version: March 2008.
What happens to real wages and wage inequality when a country opens to trade and industrialization? I construct new wage series for China from 1858 to 1936. I collect the nominal wages from the records of the China Maritime Customs, and estimate real wages for unskilled and skilled workers using new group-specific cost of living indices. I find that real wages of the unskilled were stagnant throughout the period, likely because of China’s large stock of unskilled labor. Skilled wages rose rapidly between 1858 and 1920 and fell thereafter. My findings suggest that technological advances increased skill demand, driving up the skill premium. Educational progress eventually increased the supply of skilled workers, thereby reducing the skilled wage. This pattern is consistent with the story of “race between technology and education”.
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