 The rise of the middle class: the income gap between salaried employees and workers in Sweden, ca. 1830–1940Erik Bengtsson and Svante Prado Scandinavian Economic History Review, 2020, vol. 68, issue 2, 91-111 Abstract: We present the first comprehensive, long run salary information on Swedish middle-class employees before the twentieth century. Our data include, for instance, school teachers, professors, clerks, policemen and janitors in Stockholm and Sweden, ca. 1830–1940. We use the new data to compare the annual earnings of these middle-class employees with the annual earnings of farm workers, unskilled construction workers and manufacturing workers. The results show that the income gap between the middle class and the working class widen drastically from the mid-nineteenth century to a historically high level during the 1880s and 1890s. The differentials then decreased during the first four decades of the twentieth century. The bulging earnings advantage of middle-class employees vis-à-vis unskilled workers chimes with Kocka’s depiction of the latter half of the nineteenth century as the era of the bourgeoisie. Date: 2020 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:sehrxx:v:68:y:2020:i:2:p:91-111 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2019.1650293 Access Statistics for this article Scandinavian Economic History Review is currently edited by Espen Ekberg and Francisco Beltran Tapia More articles in Scandinavian Economic History Review from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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