Wages, labour market, and living standards in China, 1530-1840

Ziang Liu

Economic History Working Papers from London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History

Abstract: Historical wages continue to provide new insights into the long-term development of the economy. In early modern Europe, the standard wage narrative hypothesises a “little divergence” in which England and the Low Countries outperformed other economies between 1500 and 1750. However, our knowledge of Chinese wage history remains considerably limited when it comes to the “great divergence” debate between China and leading economies in Europe. This article contributes to building a wage series in Lower Yangzi China from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It shows that despite the continued increase of nominal wages over this period, real day wages witnessed a sharp decline between 1620 and 1640, followed by a substantial improvement after1650, until a quick decline between 1740 and 1760. A wage gap between the Lower Yangzi and London may open up in the early eighteenth century, but this implication still awaits further examination considering the measurement limits in the current approach.

Keywords: wage; living standard; labour market; early modern China; great divergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J31 N15 N30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115031/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:wpaper:115031

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic History Working Papers from London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History LSE, Dept. of Economic History Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager on behalf of EH Dept. ().