Editor's choice Labor, wages, and living standards in Java, 1680–1914

Pim De Zwart and Jan Luiten van Zanden

European Review of Economic History, 2015, vol. 19, issue 3, 215-234

Abstract: The development of living standards in Java has long been a subject of scholarly interest. A number of scholars have suggested that between 1600 and 1900 Southeast Asian living standards declined significantly. The present article contributes to these issues by calculating long-term real wages for Java between 1680 and 1914, following Allen's subsistence basket methodology. New data on wages and prices were collected from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives and connected to data on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The resultant long-term real wage developments show a slightly different picture of Javanese living standards than that which has emerged from the literature to date.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/hev007 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:ereveh:v:19:y:2015:i:3:p:215-234.

Access Statistics for this article

European Review of Economic History is currently edited by Christopher M. Meissner, Steven Nafziger and Alessandro Nuvolari

More articles in European Review of Economic History from European Historical Economics Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().