Chapter 1__________________________________________________________

Income Growth and Inequality over the Very Long Run:
England, India and Japan ComparedOsamu Saito

Introduction
In The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy(published in 2000), Ken Pomeranz argued that until about 1750, both East Asia and western
Europe were reasonably advanced in terms of commercial growth and market integration, andhence that the former region’s standard of living was more or less on a par with that of the latter.
The book thus postulates that there had been a sort of East-West convergence before the real divergence emerged with the industrialisation of the nineteenth century, and as such has stimulated
debate amongst economic historians at both ends of Eurasia (Pomeranz, 2000).
Although the empirical basis of the argument was not particularly solid in his 2000 book,much progress has since then been made by quantitatively oriented economic historians such as
Bob Allen and Jan Luiten van Zanden. They are chiefly concerned with the inter-regional comparison of real wage levels in the early modern period, for which it is difficult to apply PPP or
similar methods of adjustment. Allen’s new method, which postulates a minimum level of caloric
and protein intakes but allows for an actual basket of consumer goods to vary across countries,
enables us to calculate a family’s level of wage earnings in relation to the subsistence line. He first
applied this measure, called the ‘welfare ratio’, to European countries, and then with van Zanden
and others extended the exercise to areas outside Europe, that is, China and Japan (Allen, 2001,
2005; Allen et al., 2005).
These are findings that, on the face of it, suggest that great divergence had already existed in
the early modern period, for the welfare ratios calculated for East Asia were substantially lower
than those for northwestern Europe, that is, England and the Netherlands. At the same time, they
have found that a similar divergence had also emerged within Europe—southern Europe lagged
behind the northwestern countries. To put it differently, while England and the Netherlands were
well ahead of the rest of the world, East Asia was on a par with southern Europe. This picture isindeed not inconsistent with that derived from conventional measures of growth and standard ofliving. Recent estimates of per-capita GDP made by Angus Maddison and van Zanden (for Europe
only) do indicate that there was a European divergence during the early modern period as well asnorthwestern Europe’s supremacy over East Asia in terms of both level and growth rate (Maddison,
2001; van Zanden, 2005).
As far as Japan is concerned, their findings may be taken to imply that Tokugawa Japan was
somewhat better performing amongst countries in the ‘rest of the world’ group. Indeed, there is-3-

Osamu Saito

consensus that despite the de facto lack of overseas trade, there did occur a modest kind of growthduring the Tokugawa period: a quarter of a century ago, Thomas Smith drew our attention to thisphenomenon and suggested that it should be characterised as a kind of rural-centred growth (Smith,1973). There is now consensus that there was modest growth in Tokugawa Japan: a numerical expression of it may be found in Maddison’s estimates of per-capita GDP growth rates, which are nothigh but consistently positive, and in sharp contrast with those of imperial China, which are estimated to be zero over the Ming and Qing periods.1
As for real wages, I accept that the welfare ratio estimates derived solely from wage data
were below the levels enjoyed by northwestern European populations. However, I have argued
elsewhere (Saito, 2005b):(1) that non-wage incomes were not negligible in the Japanese family economy, so that thehousehold income could have been on a par with the yearly wage earnings of the northwestern European household; and(2) that its underlying difference was a contrast between a peasant and proletarian family
economy. Nevertheless,(3) both experienced early modern growth with the common denominator being an increased
Smithian division of labour.
Such ‘Smithian growth’ may be equated with market growth. By ‘Smithian growth’, however, I mean something different from Joel Mokyr’s definition, which embraces both static anddynamic gains. Also, Mokyr’s denotes just one source of economic growth, others being Solovian,
Shumpeterian, and Boserupian: with this typology, one can periodise history as moving from theMalthusian to the Smithian, then on to the Shumpeterian (Mokyr, 1990, pp. 4-6).2 Here, I refer toincreasing returns derived from an increased division of labour in Adam Smith’s sense or, to use
Alyn Young’s terminology (1928), from increased roundaboutness. This effect should be distinguished from static gains like those from Ricardian comparative advantages: it is more to do withthe emergence of a new market between separated processes of production, such as a market forcotton yarn that used to be prepared by weavers themselves. The notion thus enables us to cover
not just the classical industrial revolution—characterised by a disproportionate expansion of the
production of intermediate goods such as cotton yarn, iron and steel, and machine tools—but theearly modern process of proto-industrialisation as well. In other words, both Japan and the Westexperienced Smithian growth during the early modern period.
This paper turns to an issue that has not been explicitly discussed in the debate on the ‘Great
Divergence’, that is, the question of class differentials in household earnings, and places inequality
in the context of income growth from early modern to modern times.
By adding India, where de-industrialisation is said to have taken place in the nineteenth1

See Maddison (2001, pp. 251-252). His estimates for Tokugawa Japan are based largely on the figures provided
by Satoru Nakamura for farm output.
2
See also Parker (1984).

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

century, to the Europe-Japan comparison, the paper will examine the three countries’ early modernsocial tables, and how they changed over time with special reference to trends in growth and inequality in the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s.

Facts about Early Modern Growth

1990 international dollars

According to Maddison’s historical national accounts table for countries in the world, GDPper capita in the United Kingdom grew more than threefold from 1600 to 1870. On the other hand,India’s per capita GDP is estimated to have declined by 3 percent, while Japan achieved modest
growth of 42 percent over the same period (Figure 1).
If such experiences of average income
Figure 1. Maddison’s estimates of GDP per capita
and output growth are compared with thosefor UK, India and Japan, 1600-1870
of wage growth in England and Japan,
4,000
somewhat different pictures will emerge. In
Figures 2-3, I have added alternative esti3,000
mates of per-capita output growth for bothcountries (van Zanden’s less optimistic
2,000
per-capita GDP figures for England, andSatoru Nakamura’s figures for Japan, which
1,000
cover the farm sector only). Different as
these alternative estimates are, however, thegeneral conclusions are the same. In England,
0
1600
1650
1700
1750
1800
1850
a high-growth country, the growth of real
UK
India
Japan
wages for labouring men lagged far behind
Source: Maddison (2001, p. 264).
that of income experienced by men in the
middle position of the entire population. In Japan, a low-growth country, there was little gap between the two indicators. It is not unlikely that early modern growth in the former case was associated with a widening tendency in income inequality, while in the latter, no worsening took placein the class distribution of income.
Figure 2. Trends in wage and output growth: England, 1500-1820
250
200
150
100
50
1500

1600
Wages

1700
GDP per capita (AM)1800
GDP per capita (JvZ)

Sources: Allen (2001, p. 437); Maddison (2001, p. 264); and van Zanden (2005, Table 3).

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Osamu Saito

Figure 3. Trends in wage and output growth: Japan, 1700-1870
160

140

120

100

80
1700

1720
Wages

1740

1760

1780

GDP per capita (AM)

1800

1820

1840

1860

Farm output per capita (Nakamura)

Sources: Saito (2005a, pp. 90-95), and Maddison (2001, pp. 255, 264).

What we need to know is whether or not such contrasting tendencies in income distribution
imply that there was an equally substantial gap between the two countries in terms of the absolutelevel of inequality. In the next section, therefore, I explore this issue by introducing a third country,
Mughal India, into the Eurasian comparison.

Comparative Early Modern Social Tables
The seventeenth-century political arithmetician Gregory King put forward ‘A scheme of theincome, and expence, of the several families of England; calculated for the year 1688’.3 This sortof table is called ‘social table’, which enables us to show both the level of household income andthat of overall inequality among the social classes in one table. In this section, an attempt is madeto compare King’s social table for Stuart England at the end of the seventeenth century with thosefor Mughal India and Tokugawa Japan.
For Mughal India, there is an interesting attempt by Maddison (1971). His guesswork provides us with percentage distributions of income and the labour force for c.1600, from which we
can calculate one social class’s average income per capita relative to those for other classes. What
we have for Tokugawa Japan instead are data for regional income by industry. The region is thesamurai domain (han) of Chōshū. Located at the end of the western end of Honshū Island, thismini-state was neither poor nor very rich by late-Tokugawa standards. For the Chōshū economy,
thanks to Shunsaku Nishikawa’s pioneering work, estimates of output are available by industry,
net of input. What is not available is the distribution of the total net output across various socialgroups within the domain. As explained in Appendix 1, by making a couple of rather strong assumptions, I have converted Nishikawa’s net output data into average household income estimatesby social class.
A couple of other considerations are necessary in order to make the three-country compari3

King, Natural and Political Observations, reproduced in Laslett (1973).

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

son possible. One is the classification of social classes, and the other the question of how household income should be compared between the countries chosen.
As for the former, I adopt Maddison’s three-category scheme: village and non-village, thelatter of which is further divided into the ruling elite and the rest. Thus, Tokugawa Japan’s four
statuses, samurai (shi), peasant (nō), artisan (kō), and merchant (shō), are grouped into the rulingsamurai, the urban (kō and shō), and the village (nō) population. For England, since King’s table ismore detailed in terms of occupational classification, I have tried to regroup them into the samebroad categories as for Tokugawa Japan. One difficulty in such a reclassification, however, is theplace of soldiers. The samurai were administrator-soldiers, while in the other two countries, thevast majority of soldiers were a separate group of government employees who were never regarded as part of the ruling elite. In the case of England, I have made two alternative calculations
for the ruling class with and without soldiers, but since the two do not alter the results greatly, theEnglish distributions will be presented in the following tables without soldiers in the ruling class(no adjustment is made for the Indian table since where soldiers were classified is not explicit).
The second is concerned with the inter-country comparison of living standards. I haveshown elsewhere that although early modern northwestern European countries were ahead of Tokugawa Japan in terms of GDP per capita, their household income levels are likely to have been on
similar levels if the class of agricultural labourers and that of peasants are chosen for comparison(Saito, 2005b). This is because while the family of a European agricultural labourer lived mostly
on wage earnings, the Japanese peasant family had a mixed income. If they owned their own land,
they received both land and labour shares of the agricultural value added plus a non-negligible
portion of earnings from non-farm by-employment. As for the England-Japan comparison, therefore, their household incomes are assumed to have been more or less comparable (although this isprobably an underestimate for England because in its village economy, there were small but sizeable higher-income, non-labouring populations). This should not be taken to imply that GDP per
capita was the same for the two countries: average household incomes of other classes are likely tohave differed between the countries.
Table 1. The distribution of income by social class: England, India and Japan
Social classNon-village
A. Population share (%)
England, 1688
India, c.1600
Japan, 1840s
B. Income per capita (Village=100)
England, 1688
India, c.1600
Japan, 1840s

Village

Elite

Middling

4
1
10

18
17
15

78
82
75

602
2,563
177

202
372
160

100
100
100

Source: Laslett (1973), with corrections made in Arkell (2006); Maddison (1971, p. 33), and Table
A.2 below.

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Osamu Saito

Turning to the India-Japan comparison, very little is known about how their absolute levelsof household or per-capita income were compared with each other in the period before the nineteenth century. Since Maddison’s (2001, p. 264) historical national accounts suggest that there was
not much difference in the level of GDP per capita between the two countries in the seventeenth
century (in 1990 international dollars, 550 and 520 respectively in 1600, and 550 and 570 in 1700),
I have decided to assume simply that the national average household income was identical in theearly modern period, an assumption which allows me to directly compare the pattern of income
inequality between the two countries.
Table 1 sets out both social stratifications and income distributions for the three countries.
According to panel A, while Mughal India had comparatively the largest village population, its
size in Tokugawa Japan was not larger than in England. As for the middling sort of non-village
population, its size was comparatively largest in England, while the smallest was found in Japan.
Such comparative results for Japan may sound a little surprising, but it is chiefly because Tokugawa Japan had an excessively large elite population. This elite class of samurai was not a landed
aristocracy: a vast majority of them were stipend receivers from the overlord (daimyo). As a class,they also included vassals of a samurai. Although they were usually not rich since their stipends
did not come from the overlord but from their master samurai, they were given the status of samurai.
Panel B shows the average household income per family member in each social class relative to that of the village population for the three countries. There is a surprisingly sharp contrast
between Mughal India and Tokugawa Japan. The former is unusually unequal, whereas the latter
looks almost egalitarian; and Stuart England comes in between. Admittedly, we cannot assume that
income inequality within each social class was more or less identical across the countries. It is forexample not unlikely that the gap between rich and poor samurai families was greater than that in
England. However, even when such intra-class differentials can be taken into account, the overall
comparison will not be very different: the level of inequality was low in Tokugawa Japan by earlymodern standards.
One explanatory note is necessary for the Tokugawa case, however. While class differentials
in income are usually measured on a before-tax basis, and procedures for England followed thistradition, the calculation for Tokugawa Japan has been made on an after-tax basis. This reflects thepeculiar system of Tokugawa taxation. Under Tokugawa rule, indirect taxes were insignificant.
Although there are some transit taxes collected at ports and river landings, no customs, no excise
duties, and no market charges were instituted. Two consequences of this system were that first, adisproportionately large proportion of samurai revenues came from direct taxation on land. For thesamurai household, therefore, before-tax income had no meaning. Second, the level of taxation
was heavy on produce from land, while it was unbelievably low on non-agricultural pursuits.4 If
4 According to Shunsaku Nishikawa’s estimates for the regional economy of Chōshū in the 1840s (see Appendix 1
for details), the proportion of taxes to the total value added was 33 percent. However, the sectoral difference wasenormous: the rate of tax burden in agriculture was 52 percent, whereas it stood as low as 3 percent in the
non-agricultural sector (calculated from Nishikawa, 1987, p. 325).

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

comparison had been made on a before-tax basis, then the average before-tax income of Tokugawa
farmers would have become unrealistically higher than the corresponding income for
non-agricultural producers.
Figure 4 combines such conclusions about
Figure 4. Comparative early modern social
structures in England, India and Japan
stratification and income distribution with comparative information about living standards for the three
20
countries. The horizontal axis measures the relative
16
size of the population in each social class, and therelative level of household income per capita is12measured along the vertical axis. Each building block
represents a social class with the village population
8
on the basement, next, the middle class, and the eliteon the top. The height (that is, income per capita) of
4
the village population is assumed to be the same forboth England and Japan, while the total area of the
0
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
three blocks is assumed to be identical for India andSource: Table 2 above. See also text.
Japan. This single diagram clearly shows how different the three early modern countries were in termsof both income level and distribution. These were consequences of the early modern economic
performance of each country, and also of institutional settings that had shaped the people’s economic activities in the period in question.
Thus, Figure 4 indicates what might be called pre-conditions for subsequent changes in eachcountry. Did an egalitarian society become unequal as its economy grew? Or is it an unequal society that became even more unequal in the subsequent periods? These are questions we turn to in
the next section.

Changes in The Subsequent Periods
England
In his classic essay on historical relationships between economic growth and income inequality, Simon Kuznets hypothesised, based chiefly on the historical experiences of Great Britain
and two other countries, that inequality increased in the initial phase of modern economic growthfollowed by another phase of contracting inequality, for which period he was empirically on firmer
ground (Kuznets, 1955).
Now, the pattern is much clearer for Great Brittan. There is evidence that the Gini coefficient for the nation peaked at a level of 0.54-0.55 in 1867. The decline since then was gradual, but
accelerated after World War I, reaching 0.42 in 1938/9 (Figure 5, for which all calculations are for
before-tax incomes).

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Osamu Saito

Gini coefficient

Figure 5. Gini coefficients: England and Wales/Great
Although the problem of poverty was
Britain, 1688-1938/9
not yet solved and factors at work were
0.6
complicated,5 the tendency of contracting
inequality was apparent from 1870 onwards.
0.5
A few points may be made about how it
0.4
went. First, output growth in the period between 1873 and 1913 slowed down in com0.3
parison with the 1831-73 period, but man0.2
aged to remain on a comparable level during
1650
1700
1750
1800
1850
1900
1950
the classic industrial revolution, despite theEnagland and WalesGreat Britain
difficulties Britain faced in the international
Source: For 1688-1913, Williamson (1985, p. 68), and for
1938/9, Royal Commission (1977, p. 240).
productivity race with emerging industrial
powers like Germany and the USA. The
annual rate of growth in GDP was 1.7 percent in 1780-1831, 2.4 percent in 1831-73, and 1.8 percent in 1873-1913 (Crafts, 2004, p. 11). Second, forces in the labour market worked, howevermodestly, for the wage differential between skilled and unskilled manual jobs to contract in the
period after the 1860s—in the phase up to World War I, slowly and since 1914, more evidently(Phelps Brown, 1977, pp. 71, 73). The movement of the workforce was from low- to high-wage
occupations, and from poorer to wealthier regions, and while the relative importance of profits andproperty incomes declined, the share of wages and salaries went up, although middle-class salaried
employees gained more than working-class men.6 Third, however, social security measures introduced before the Beveridge reforms seem to have exerted a non-negligible impact on the decline ininequality. Starting with the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act, several measures were introduced in theareas of health and employment under the Liberal and subsequent governments, as a result of
which by 1937, 5-6 percent of the national income had already been redistributed to the poor
(Hatton and Bailey, 1998).7

Japan
After a long period of self-imposed seclusion, Japan re-entered world trade amid the emergence of the first globalisation wave. The stylised facts about inequality trends, summarised
graphically in Figure 6, for the period after the late nineteenth century are as follows: first, there
was a sweeping rise in income inequality from 1895 to 1937, during which GDP per capita grew at
an average annual rate of 1.7 percent—a takeoff from the slow-growing Tokugawa past.8 According to Ryoshin Minami’s (1998, 2000) estimates for before-tax income distribution, the Gini index
was 0.42 in 1890-94 and 0.57 in 1937. If back projected, this implies that the coefficient level musthave been a little over 0.3 soon after the opening of the country in 1859. It is worth emphasising
5 See for example Daunton (2007, ch.12).
6 For factor shares, see Mathews, Feinstein, and Odling-Smee, (1982, p. 164).
7 See also Middleton (2004, pp. 487-488).
8 Calculated from GDE data. Ohkawa and Shinohara (1979, tables A3 and A53, pp. 256-258, 392-393).

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

Gini coefficientthat while the level of 0.3 does not compare unfavourably with any present-day welfare state, theestimated coefficient of 0.57 for the late 1930s is higher compared not only with the corresponding
British figure, but also with Britain’s peak index in 1867. Thus, in less than a century, Japanchanged from a reasonably egalitarian to a very unequal society. Then came a sudden drop in theGini coefficient in the period of austerity and reforms immediately after World War II. In 1956, theGini stood as low as 0.31. Subsequently, the coefficients remained generally low, although it isworth noting that there were alternating sub-periods: an initial rise, a long period of decline, and a
recent upturn in inequality.
Although little effort has been
Figure 6. Gini coefficients: Japan, c.1860-1994
0.6
made to identify what accounted forthe spectacular rise in income ine0.5
quality from the late nineteenth
century to 1940, there is a thesis
0.4
proposed by Jeffrey Williamson(2000, 2002). He argues that the
0.3
expansion of global trade triggered
0.2
by transport innovations since 1870
1860
1880
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
2000
brought about commodity priceSource: Minami (1998, p. 45; 2000, p. 44).
convergence in the world markets,
Note: The dotted line is an extrapolation from the 1895-1937 trend.
which led to a more even distribution of income in developed countries but to an increase in income inequality in Asian and otherless industrialised countries. It is shown that such effects, revealed in wage-rental andwage-income ratios, were felt more profoundly in the period before 1914, while in the period between the two world wars, the ratios levelled off in many Asian countries. He believes that Japanwas no exception.
Interesting and stimulating as his hypothesis is, however, the periodisation suggested byWilliamson does not fit the Japanese case. This is partly because there may well have been somecomputational errors in his tables for Japan (see Appendix 2). Also, a glance at the historiography
reveals that there is consensus that differentials in both wages and income widened in the inter-war
period, whereas in the period before World War I, wage and income growth was more or less balanced (Nakamura, 1983, pt. 1).
There also exist a few issues that account for why the impact of globalisation was felt differently in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, the increase in inequality was far more marked in urban than in rural regions (Minami, 1998, pp. 45-46). This was particularly the case, not in the first globalisation period, but in the inter-war period when Japan aswell as other economies of the world became inward looking.
Second, in the lower sections of society, especially in the rural sector, income-levelling
forces seem to have been at work. The time series of both wage-income and wage-rental ratios do
not exhibit patterns expected from the globalisation thesis (for details, see Appendix 2). The ratioof wages to GDP per capita (in Figure 7) shows that between 1859 and 1870, growth in national- 11 -

Osamu Saito

1913 = 1.0

1913 = 1.0

income was faster than wage growth, Figure 7. Wage-GDP per capita ratios in Japan, 1820-1938
2suggesting that it was a consequence
1.5
of entry into global trade. This effectdid not last long, however. There1
was an unmistakable rebound in the
0.5late 1870s and, after a sharp drop at0
the time of deflation around 1880, it
1820
1840
1860
1880
1900
1920
1940
remained at that level until theW/Y(I)
World War I period. After 1920, theSource: Appendix 2. The wage series used to calculate the ratios isfor building craftsmen in Edo/Tokyo (series I: 1818-1881), soyratio increased initially, reflecting
sauce makers in Chōshi (series II: 1830-1881), and industrial workboth economic difficulties after theers (1882-1938).
wartime boom and the downward
Figure 8. Wage-rental ratios in Japanese agriculture, 1885-1939
rigidity in money wages, then de3
clined sharply after the 1929 Great
Depression. The latter ratio of2
wages to land rents (in Figure 8)
also exhibits a similar pattern: stable1in the period before World War I,
rising until 1930, and declining
0
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
sharply during the depression period
Source: Appendix 2.
of the early 1930s. There is also
evidence that differentials in landholding started declining after the period of increased inequality in landholding between the timeof the Land Tax Reform of 1873 and 1908. The trend of levelling-off continued up until the 1940s.
Third, given the benign effect of globalisation on factor shares in the domestic economy, we
may turn to other areas for explanation. Although it is impossible to go beyond impressions, twopoints may be made. First, it seems that no deliberate measures were taken to curtail the handsome
profits gained through new business opportunities opened up since the Meiji Restoration. Second,no effective social security measures were introduced by pre-World War II governments, either; itis symbolic indeed that the Ministry of Welfare was founded as late as 1938.
India
Angus Maddison compared the Mughal social table with that at the end of British rule. Table
2 shows that no drastic change occurred in between, but if any, it suggests that it was a slight decline in the share of top incomes (Maddison, 1971, pp. 33, 69). The elite or upper-class families’
share declined from 15 percent to 14 percent, and since ‘traders and bankers’, excluded from the1600 table, were included in the 1940 table, the actual decline must have been a little more substantial.

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

Table 2.

Social stratifications and income distributions of India, c.1600-1940
c.1600Population
Income share
share (%)(%)

Non-village
Elite/upper
Lower
Village
Upper
MiddleLandless
Tribal

18
1
17
72

52
15
37
45

10

3

c.1940Population share Income share
(%)
(%)
18
1
17
75
9
49
17
7

44
14
30
54
20
30
4
2

Source: Maddison (1971, pp. 33, 69).
Note: The elite category of the Moghul does not include merchants and bankers, and traditional
professions, while the upper category at the end of British rule includes Indian capitalist, merchants and managers, and the new Indian professional class.

No measures of overall inequality are available for the earlier periods, only for 1875 and1950. The estimates of the Gini coefficients put forward by Tirthankar Roy for the two benchmark
years point to a ‘mild decline from a level above 0.35 to nearer 0.3’; and the reason for the high1875 estimate seems to be found in the ‘feature that the British rulers of India had emulated from
the Mughals—the presence of a tiny governmental elite that received fantastically large incomes’,
thus suggesting that the finding from Maddison’s tables must reflect, at least partially, that thischange that took place in more recent periods (Roy, 2007, p. 86).
However, inequality trends in rural India—which cannot be discerned from Maddison’s tables—may well have been different. In its rural regions, while agricultural production expanded,cottage and craft industries declined.9 According to Roy’s survey of evidence, while data for thenineteenth century are ambiguous, there are indications that rural inequality increased during thefirst half of the twentieth century. The ratio of agricultural wages to rents seems to have declined,
and the wage-income ratio for the whole country also declined up to about 1930. Also, as indicatedin Table 2, there emerged a class of landless, rural proletarians: its population share had become
nearer to 20 percent by the end of the British period.10 What happened in India’s countryside wasin sharp contrast with her Asian neighbour, Japan, where the wage share increased at the expenseof rent receivers and proletarianisation never took place in agriculture throughout its history since
Tokugawa times.
Given the size of the agricultural sector in that period, these findings may be taken to suggest that inequality increased in agriculture from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
On the face of it, these findings are not inconsistent with Williamson’s thesis, as he sees income
inequality in Asian countries, including India, increasing in the period before World War I, andlevelling off in the period between the two wars. But Roy argues based on various pieces of evi9 Roy (2006, chs.3-4), and also Roy (2005). Whether or not the magnitude of de-industrialisation was as marked as

has been supposed is yet to be debated.
10 See Roy (2007, pp. 84-87). For an interpretation of the 1950 Gini coefficient, see also Ojha and Bhatt (1964).

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Osamu Saito

dence that much of the problem of increased poverty and, hence, increased income inequality inrural India between 1870 and 1940 cannot be accounted for by the impact of globalisation, butshould be ‘explained with reference to internal factors of the rural economy, and in particular to
production conditions in agriculture which moved from land surplus to land shortage with more orless unchanging land yield’ (Roy, 2007, p. 91).

Concluding Remarks
In this paper, I have looked at the historical cases of England, India, and Japan—a minusculesample in the statistical sense—in order to examine the relationships between income growth andinequality over the very long run. Not many conclusions can be drawn from such a small sample
study. However, a few remarks may be made.
First, it is likely that Smithian growth was associated with a widening trend in income inequality, unless external forces such as state actions intervened, or unless exceptionally strong income growth exerted a trickle-down effect. Take the early modern west European case, whose
growth paths were often characterised by both market expansion and proletarianisation. According
to van Zanden’s work, the levels of inequality in both income and wealth had already generally
been high and were on the increase over the entire period in question, suggesting that the history of
the Kuznets curve can be extended into the early modern period (van Zanden, 1995). On the other
hand, Tokugawa Japan’s experience, on the face of it, seems inconsistent with this proposition.
However, the country was cut off from global trade in the Tokugawa period, which as Thomas
Smith (1973, p. 37) argued decades ago, may well have an adverse effect on both town merchants
and the samurai: they failed to seize gains from the commercial activities that one would like toterm ‘merchant capitalism’. This in turn implies that the distribution of income would become uneven after the opening of the treaty ports, irrespective of commodity price convergence in the
global market. The case of Japan in the periods before and after entry into world trade, therefore, is
not inconsistent with the interpretation here.
Second, the provisos given to the above statement suggest that the historical institutionalsetting was very important in determining early modern inequality levels. Although it is impossible
to compile a complete list of particular institutions at this stage, I can think of at least three as factors that exerted a profound influence on the distribution of income across the social classes, that is,
the existence or absence of a landed aristocracy, overseas trade, and tax farming and other forms ofrent seeking. In Mughal India, all three existed; in early modern England, the first two were present; and in Tokugawa Japan, none existed.
Third, on the other hand, the Indian case seems to suggest that class structure such as thecaste system exerted strong, far-reaching effects on both inequality and income growth. In one
sense, a social arrangement such as this may well have increased the social division of labour beyond the existing level of productivity since all sorts of non-farm occupations were hereditarily
fixed. It is suggested that the proportion of non-agricultural occupations could be incredibly
high—according to one case study of a south Indian region, as high as 45 percent—by early mod-- 14 -

Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

ern Asian standards.11 At the same time, the system was not only inequality enhancing, but is likely
to have acted as an obstacle to further growth by limiting the scope for the Smithian division oflabour. Tirthankar Roy points out in a recent article on divergent technological pathways in theearly modern world that while artisanal skills were learned and transmitted along the family line,
most elite artisan castes tended to be ‘engaged in the production of final goods rather than intermediate goods’. For example, in textiles and iron making, there was an unmistakable tendency for
producers of final goods to rely on self-made tools and other capital goods, which in turn discouraged the development of specialist producers of those intermediate goods. Thus, he concludes,‘Crafts tended to simplify tools and develop craftsmanship instead. Tool making and material
processing on a commercial scale became marginal traditions’.12 Undoubtedly, such traditions
must not only have limited the scope for technological innovation and spillover, but Smithian
growth, the process of the proliferation of industries and markets with increasing returns, also set
in.
Finally, it is worth re-emphasising that the issue of inequality should be integrated into theagenda for the Great Divergence debate. By examining the inequality question with the issues ofmarket growth and integration, and also with the question of living standards, we will be able togain a far better understanding of global economic history from a comparative perspective.

11 Mizushima (2008), citing J.K. Bajaj and M.D. Srinivas on 2,200 villages in the Jagir, Chingleput, south India.
12 Roy (2008), especially pp. 371, 386.

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Osamu Saito

Appendix 1. Household income per capita by social class in Tokugawa JapanIn his article on farm family by-employment in one Chōshū county, Kaminoseki, Thomas
Smith demonstrated how high, by early modern standards, the share of non-farm production andhow large the proportion of non-farm incomes to the total income earned by farm families could
have been. The data he utilised are district returns of a region-wide survey taken by the Chōshū
government in the early 1840s,13 and his research results show that as much as 55 percent of thecounty’s domestic product was non-agricultural, that the proportion exceeded 70 percent in four
districts of the county, and also that in many districts, the proportion of non-farm earnings to thetotal farm household income was over 50 percent with the lowest being 16 percent and the highest,
75 percent. In order to arrive at these estimates, he made assumptions about sources of non-farmincomes earned by farm families and a county-level productivity ratio between the farm andnon-farm sectors (Smith, 1988). Now that, thanks to Shunsaku Nishikawa’s painstaking study ofthe same survey returns,14 we have a more comprehensive set of statistics (including a two-sector
input-output table) for the entire Chōshū region, similar calculations may be made at the regional
level, which will in turn enable us to make some rough estimates of differentials in income percapita by social class in the late Tokugawa period.
The Chōshū material is surprisingly detailed as a pre-modern survey of output and income.
However, there was an unmistakable tendency for non-farm services to be substantially underreported. In order to overcome this difficulty, Smith assumed a fixed productivity ratio between thefarm and non-farm sectors in Kaminoseki, while Nishikawa has tried hard to derive a region-wide
estimate for each industry from the actual data in the returns. Also, Nishikawa pays more attention
to intermediate inputs as one of his aims has been to construct an input-output table for the entire
region. All this resulted in more realistic and consistent estimates of output and earnings invalue-added terms. For example, the results give 39 percent as the share of non- agricultural production for the entire Chōshū region, suggesting that Kaminoseki was one of the most developed
areas in the region, and probably in the whole country (Nishikawa, 1987, p. 329).
Another problem we have with this survey material is that household incomes are not readily available. What the survey returns give us are two separate kinds of data. One is a table of grossproducts, from which Nishikawa has successfully estimated output net of intermediate inputs forten industrial categories. The other is an occupational table, for which enumeration in the original
survey was made for household heads only. There is no one-to-one relation between classification
categories in these industrial and household tables. There are more industrial categories thanI am most grateful to Professor Shunsaku Nishikawa for allowing me to use some of his worksheets and also toread manuscripts for a book on the Chōshū economy, which he is currently drafting, in the process of writing thisappendix.
13 Later compiled and published by the Yamaguchi-ken Monjo-kan (Yamaguchi Prefectural Archives) as Bōchō
fūdo chūshin-an in 22 volumes.
14 Nishikawa (1987) and Nishikawa and Akimoto (1977). The monetary system used in Chōshū was a silver one. It
was originally a currency by weight with 1 kan = 1,000 momme. By the 1840s, however, paper money was introduced by the domain government and remained in circulation. All the values quoted below are in silver-denominated domain notes (hansatsu).

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

household groups, suggesting that occupational categories like ‘farm household’ and ‘merchant’
were omnibus terms. Facing this problem, Smith made the assumption that farm families ‘produced all such income not produced by nonfarmers’.15 Given the prevalence of by-employment in
the countryside, this supposition sounds realistic, and what this assumption actually means is thatwhile all goods listed as ‘handicrafts’ were produced by professional, full-time artisans, paper,
cotton cloth, saké, salt, and forest products were produced by farm hands and to a lesser extent, byfishing families.
Table A1.1 sets out pre-tax
Table A1.1 Output and the number of households by occupationalclass: Chōshū in the 1840s
output estimates for ten categories
Industrial category
OutputNo. ofin value-added terms, together(kan) householdswith household numbers wherever
5,700
Samuraithe two categories are thought toVillage
85,531
58,179Agriculture
have roughly matched. Here, sec(13,300)
916
Paper
makingtoral division is made between
2,213
Cotton weaving
village and non-village (largely
2,526
Saké brewing
urban but non-governmental),
3,371
Salt making
3,567
7,155
Fishing, forestry and quarrying
rather than between farm and89,09874,360Sub-total
non-farm.16 On Smith’s assumpNon-village, non-governmental economy
tion, the former includes paper
5,840
3,972
Artisans
making, cotton weaving, saké
7,865
12,769Commerce and services
brewing, and salt making, as well
4,029
3,895
Transport and others
17,734
20,636Sub-total
as fishing, forestry, and quarrying.
Total
98,996
112,532
According to this table, 83 percent
Sources: Nishikawa (1987, pp. 325, 326, 332), Nishikawa and Akiof the region’s commoner populamoto (1977, pp. 106-108, 113-115).
Note: 1) Output estimates are pre-tax and net of intermediate inputs.
tion (or 79 percent of the total
2) The number of samurai households does not include their repopulation including samurai andtainer (baishin) families, who numbered approximately 6,200.
their families and retainers) were
3) Paper making households are included in the number of farmhouseholds.
in the village sector. A vast ma4) For cotton weaving, sake brewing and salt making, no correjority of them were classified as
sponding entry is found in the occupation table of each village
return. They are thought to have been produced by farm or fishfarmers, while agriculture repreing households or both.
sented only 59 percent of the re15 Smith, ‘Farm family’; quote from Smith (1988, p. 81).
16 Unlike Smith’s and Nishikawa’s, this excise places fishermen in the ‘farm’ sector. It is true that there was a small

but sizeable number of wealthy fisher-entrepreneurs on the one hand and petty, self-employed fishermen on theother. However, it is also true that a vast number of fishermen did combine fishing with farming, and also that many
farm families in the coastal villages are likely to have engaged in fishing as a subsidiary occupation. According tothis broader definition, there were 89,000 households in the ‘farm’ and 18,000 households in the ‘non-farm’ sector.
The former yielded 28,000 kan of agricultural products and also produced 17,000 kan of non-agricultural commodities altogether, while the latter sector yielded 19,000 kan of earnings. Both farm and non-farm incomes thus calculated are after-tax earnings, although the overall tax rate was as high as 52 percent on agricultural products, whereas
it was just 3 percent on non-agricultural products (Nishikawa, 1987, p. 325). To calculate the farm and non-farmaverages, the assumption is made that the ‘surpluses’ of 4,000 kan were generated only by non-farm activities.

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Osamu Saito

gion’s total product (the proportion increases to 66 percent if fishing, forestry, and quarrying are
included). With by-employment activities, in other words, the village economy’s share in the total
product amounted to 75 percent.
These statistics, together with information about samurai stipends, allow us to calculate
after-tax, per-capita income estimates for three classes, that is, samurai, non-village (largely urban)
households, and village households, provided that tax rates are known and that population data are
available for the three population groups. Tax payments made by farm households are estimatedby Nishikawa to be approximately 30,000 kan plus 400 kan paid additionally by the cottage industryof paper making, while the total taxes paid by others amount to 600 kan only.17 Population dataalso exist but are less accurate than household data. The data for samurai families are particularly
weak and likely to have excluded live-in domestic servants (they were commoners so that they had
to be listed separately). Approximate figures for samurai, non-village, and village populations are
50,000 (10 percent), 78,000 (15 percent), and 392,000 (75 percent).18 Thus, estimated income percapita is 220 momme, 257 momme, and 112 momme, respectively (Table A1.2, assumption I).19
The results indicate that the productivity ratio between village and non-village populations
was a little over 1:2, which on the face of it looks reasonable.20 On closer inspection, however, itturns out that the imputed average non-village, urban incomes per capita exceed those of thesamurai by 17 percent. No doubt there existed very wealthy merchants in the castle town, and it isprobably true that in Chōshū, too, the samurai’s stipend levels tended to decline in real terms. Yet,
it is highly unlikely that the average income level of the ruling class dipped below the average of
all occupational classes in the non-village, urban sector, suggesting that the latter average is anoverestimate, a result of having divided an inflated income total by a more or less usable population figure.

17 Nishikawa (1987, p. 326), and Nishikawa and Akimoto (1977, pp. 106-107). Under the Tokugawa regime, there

was only one kind of taxation, that is, land tax. Although supplementary taxes did exist on various sources, no systematic effort was made by either the shogunate or daimyo governments to raise revenues from non-farm activities
by collecting indirect taxes. The reason that Chōshū’s paper industry had to pay additional contributions is that it
was under an export promotion scheme set up by the regional government.
18 For the samurai population, there is much uncertainty regarding the head counts. Chōshū’s samurai class was twotiered: there were genuine samurai and their retainers (baishin). The latter were hereditary retainers of their own
master samurai, not retainers of the overlord, so that the samurai had to support their retainers and the retainers’
families from stipends they received from the lord. The problem here is that in the case of samurai, it is their family
size that we have no data for, whereas in the case of retainers, we are uncertain about the number of their household
heads (see Suematsu, 1911, vol.1, pp.12-13). Thus Nishikawa assumed, based on a genealogical study of samurai
fertility (Yamamura, Study of Samurai, ch.5), that both samurai and their retainers had on average 4.25 family
members in order to estimate the missing figures. This assumption may be considered conservative since even thecalculated mean size of household for the commoner class is 4.4. At any rate, the average of 8.8 overstates the actual size of an average samurai family because in this calculation, retainers are treated as if they had been the mastersamurai’s domestic servants. On the other hand, there is a factor that tended to understate the actual size of household: the assumed quotient of 4.25 does not cover non-samurai servants living in the samurai household. All this
implies that a per-capita income figure presented in the table above is likely to be an overestimate for the samurai.
19 Under this assumption, the proportion of non-farm earnings to the total after-tax village household income is 36
percent. On this account also, Kaminoseki seems to have been too ‘advanced’ as an average Chōshū county.
20 According to Smith’s (1988, p. 80) estimates, it was 1:2.47 for Kaminoseki County.

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

This consideration leads us
Table A1.2 Estimated income per capita by social class: Chōshū
in the 1840s
to question the adequacy of asClass
sumption I. To put it differently,
Samurai Non-village Village
the non-village total in Table A.1
89,10017,7005,700Households
may also have included non-farm
78,000 392,000
50,000Population
incomes earned by farm families
Assumption I
in the village sector. Under as43,960
20,036
Total earnings (after tax, kan) 11,000
112
257
220
Earnings per capita (momme)
sumption I, it is supposed that all
Assumption II
handicraft products were pro48,552
15,444
Total earnings (after tax, kan) 11,000
duced by full-time, non-village
124
198
220
Earnings per capita (momme)
artisans. However, an early-Meiji
Assumption III
51,98412,012
Total earnings (after tax, kan) 11,000
census of the population and their
Earnings
percapita(momme)133
154
220
occupations in Yamanashi PreSource: Same as for Table A1.1.
fecture reveals that there were
Note: 1) Samurai earnings are equal to stipends they received from themany dually occupied carpentersoverlord.
2)
Two sets of assumptions are made to estimate the sectoral totals
and other craftsmen in the counof after-tax earnings in both village and non-village sectors. For
tryside, a majority of whom redetails, see text.
ported their craftwork to be a subsidiary occupation. The Yamanashi census also shows that there were farmers whose subsidiarypursuits were in commerce and services.21 The Chōshū survey, too, gives a similar hint with respect to the category of ‘day labour’. The survey returns give 2,680 families for this category, asubstantial portion of whom were town dwellers. However, there were also those who worked byday ‘along with’ farming or ‘in the intervals between’ farming seasons. Nishikawa (1987, pp.
332-333) believes that ‘even estimating conservatively, they numbered more than 1,350’, implyingthat at least half of wage incomes were earned by farm families.22 In order to take such aspects ofrural dual occupation into account, therefore, I formulate two versions of an additional assumption,that is, that the per-capita income level in the village sector was either 10 percent or 30 percent
below the samurai average of 220 momme. Admittedly, this gap of 10 or 30 percent is arbitrarily
set. Yet the point of making this assumption lies in that it enables us to arrive at an estimate of theaverage household income per capita in the village sector, without specifying how much each
non-village industrial/commercial product actually earned by village people in the form ofby-employment. In other words, it is to assume that any difference between income figures implied by the first and the additional assumptions must have also been earned by village people in
the form of by-employment. Table A1.2 reports the results of this calculation under assumptions II
and III.23

21 Tōkei-in, Kai no kuni.
22 In Table A.1 above, ‘day labour’ is included in ‘Transport and others’.
23 Under assumption II, the proportion of non-farm earnings to the total after-tax village household income becomes46 percent.

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Osamu Saito

This second exercise gives a three-layer income differential structure of 220 momme, 198
momme, and 124 momme, while the third gives a three-layer income differential structure of 220
momme, 154 momme, and 133 momme (Table A1.2, assumptions II and III). They imply that thebottom group earned only 44 percent under assumption II and 40 percent under assumption III lessthan the highest-income group. The corresponding percentages with the middle group are 37 and14. These results may sound unbelievably undifferentiated; certainly those from the third exercise
seem a little unrealistic. However, as far as the second exercise is concerned, the results are believed to be reasonable. In fact, there are a couple of reasons to believe that even this level of income inequality could be an overestimate. First, as the third assumption indicates, if one thinksthat the difference in per-capita income between the samurai and non-village sectors must havebeen a little wider, it is to suppose that the income level of the bottom group was somewhat higher
than 124 momme, thereby making the whole differential structure even narrower. Second, the estimated top-layer income per capita, 220 momme, is likely to have been slightly overstated since
the denominator, that is, the samurai population, did not cover live-in domestic servants, whose
numbers must have been non-negligible among the ruling class.
Crude as these estimates may be, therefore, Chōshū in the 1840s seems to have been rather
egalitarian as an early modern society.
Appendix 2. Ratios of wages to GDP per capita and wages to land rents, Japan, 1818-1939
Williamson’s nominal wage series for carpenters is a combination of the Sano series up to
1874, the Bank of Japan wage series for 1868-1886, and the Long-Term Economic Statistics(LTES) estimates from 1887.24 There are a couple of problems with this combined series. First, therising trend in real wages the Sano estimates suggested for the very end of the Tokugawa period isquestionable. The data source Sano relied on was a retrospective survey of six building craftsmen
in Edo/Tokyo compiled by trade associations in the Meiji period, and even a cursory look at theoriginal tables reveals that there were many abrupt jumps and a smaller number of drops in individual craft series. Second, a close examination of the Williamson figures for the very early Meiji
years suggests that both the choice of the Bank of Japan’s nominal wage data and of the price ofrice for a cost-of-living index during the 1868-86 period, a period of volatile prices, seem to haveresulted in unreliable estimates.
In order to avoid these problems, an attempt is made to link the LTES series of all manufacturing workers directly with the Tokugawa series. The former, both nominal and real, are available
from the year 1882 onwards with the base years being 1934-36 (Ohkawa et al., 1967, p. 243).
For the Tokugawa wage series, what I have taken up first is a series derived from the samedataset on which the Sano estimates were based, estimated by myself for all the Edo/Tokyo six
I thank Yuki Umeno for research assistance in the preparation of this note.

24 Sano (1962); Nihon Ginkō (1966); and Ohkawa et al. (1967).

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Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

craftsmen collectively (Saito, 1998, 2005a). This nominal wage series covers the period from 1830
up to 1894, and its real series is derived by deflating the former with a newly constructed cost ofliving series. Second, I also use another Tokugawa wage series based on data for a soy sauce
maker in Chōshi, a country town some 90 km east of Tokyo. The series is a composite index ofskilled and unskilled workers in the industry, covering the period from 1818 to 1893 with somemissing years. The link with the LTES series is made in the overlapping years of 1882-94.
The real wage series thus estimated for the entire period 1818-1938 is shown in Table A-1,
together with the nominal series. Series I links the LTES manufacturing wage indices with the Tokugawa indices of building wages and series II, with those in the Chōshi soy sauce industry.
Like the Williamson estimates, real per-capita GDP data for the wage/per-capita GDP ratios
are Maddison’s (1995, Appendix C) estimates for the benchmark years of 1820 and 1870 and theannual series for the period after 1885. Estimates for the years between 1820 and 1870 and between 1870 and 1885 are interpolated. The ratios calculated are set out in Table A2.2, with the two
versions of the wage/per-capita GDP ratios for the period before 1881.
Apparently, money wages in the building trade were stickier than those in the soy industry.
There was also a sudden upsurge in builders’ wages in 1855 when a devastating earthquake hit Edo.
Evidence reveals that market wages recorded a sevenfold rise. Although such a hike in the market
was not fully captured by trade association data, it is evident that the natural disaster as well as therigidity associated with institutional wages kept Edo’s wage levels in the 1850s higher than thelevels in Chōshi where the quake did not affect town life, suggesting that series I cannot capture
actual changes that took place in the period before 1881. However, one problem with series II isthat Chōshi’s money wages in the 1880s seem less reliable. There were many missing years duringthat decade, and wages recorded for 1884 and 1887-88 are, on the face of it, unbelievably high.
While such wage quotations may have reflected the actual situation of an individual industry in aparticular region, it is likely that these high wages were not representative of the general situationof the 1880s. This suggests that the linked indices for the period before 1881 are a little too low.
The actual levels in series II of real wages and hence in the wage/per-capita GDP ratios may havebeen somewhat higher during the Tokugawa period than those shown in Tables A2.1 and A2.2.
For the period after 1885, I have calculated another wage/per-capita GDP ratio series (Table
A2.3). It is a series with manufacturing wages replaced by male agricultural day labourers’
wages.25 Any differences from the manufacturing wage/per-capita GDP ratios may be interpreted
as reflecting changing sectoral differentials.
Finally, Williamson’s wage/land rent ratios are re-calculated with the carpenters’ wage datareplaced by those for male agricultural day labourers.26 The results, which are not very different
from the Williamson series except for the late 1930s, are shown in Table A2.4.

25 Taken from Ohkawa et al. (1967, p. 245).
26 Land rents are from Umemura et al. (1966, pp. 220-221).

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Osamu Saito

Table A2.1.
Year
1818
1819
1820
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
1826
1827
1828
1829
1830
1831
1832
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849

Two stimates of real wage series, 1818-1938

Index (I) Index (II)

44.4
43.4
45.7
38.7
33.6
36.6
28.3
21.3
25.6
29.1
36.0
35.7
39.5
40.9
45.2
40.7
39.8
42.3
45.2
42.5

36.6
33.2
32.3
32.0
31.4
32.1
32.8
32.2
31.4
34.2
33.7
29.0
30.3
28.3
31.0
26.7
21.9
24.2
19.4
14.3
17.9
21.1
26.9
27.9
30.9
31.5
29.5
26.3
26.9
28.2
26.8

Year
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881

Index (I) Index (II)
35.0
42.8
40.8
40.3
36.6
43.6
40.4
46.3
42.3
44.4
43.3
33.8
35.9
35.1
33.8
23.7
19.4
18.0
22.1
24.1
22.5
26.8
36.7
40.9
35.2
32.5
38.8
38.0
34.0
27.0
23.6
21.2

22.5
27.7
27.0

25.1
23.6
26.2
24.0
24.6
18.7
20.3
22.6
21.6
16.3
13.7
13.1
16.3
10.4
9.5
11.0

25.5
23.0
28.6
28.6
25.7
18.9
17.4
19.5

Source: See text in Appendix 2.

- 22 -

Year

Index

Year

Index

1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910

36.5
38.0
32.2
32.1
34.0
32.0
32.6
30.7
28.8
32.2
39.5
39.1
37.9
36.9
35.4
38.9
40.9
46.9
40.0
42.6
41.0
40.4
40.8
39.3
42.7
45.9
47.5
52.1
53.1

1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938

49.4
47.9
51.0
56.6
59.1
58.4
54.4
51.9
57.4
72.6
80.8
86.7
84.6
86.7
87.9
93.9
93.5
99.1
100.9
101.5
106.6
102.2
101.5
101.7
100.8
99.0
97.4
93.2

Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

Table A2.2.
Year
1820
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
1826
1827
1828
1829
1830
1831
1832
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850

Two estimates of wage/per-capita GDP ratios, 1820-1938

Ratio (I) Ratio (II)

1.63
1.59
1.68
1.42
1.23
1.34
1.03
0.78
0.93
1.06
1.31
1.30
1.43
1.48
1.64
1.47
1.44
1.53
1.63
1.53
1.26

1.20
1.19
1.16
1.19
1.21
1.19
1.16
1.26
1.24
1.07
1.11
1.04
1.14
0.98
0.80
0.89
0.71
0.52
0.65
0.77
0.98
1.01
1.12
1.14
1.07
0.95
0.97
1.02
0.97
0.81

Year
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881

Ratio (I) Ratio (II)
1.54
1.47
1.45
1.31
1.56
1.45
1.66
1.51
1.58
1.54
1.20
1.28
1.25
1.20
0.84
0.69
0.64
0.78
0.85
0.79
0.94
1.28
1.41
1.21
1.11
1.32
1.28
1.14
0.90
0.78
0.70

0.99
0.97

0.90
0.85
0.94
0.86
0.88
0.67
0.72
0.81
0.77
0.58
0.49
0.46
0.58
0.37
0.33
0.39

0.88
0.78
0.97
0.96
0.86
0.63
0.57
0.64

Source: See text in Appendix 2.

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Year

Ratio

Year

Ratio

1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910

1.19
1.23
1.04
1.03
1.01
0.92
0.98
0.89
0.77
0.92
1.06
1.05
0.92
0.89
0.92
1.00
0.89
1.12
0.92
0.96
0.99
0.92
0.93
0.92
0.89
0.94
0.98
1.09
1.11

1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938

0.99
0.94
1.00
1.16
1.12
0.97
0.89
0.85
0.85
1.16
1.18
1.29
1.27
1.28
1.27
1.36
1.36
1.35
1.35
1.49
1.58
1.42
1.30
1.32
1.29
1.20
1.14
1.03

Osamu Saito

Table A2.3. The ratio of agricultural
wages to GDP per capita, 1885-1938
Year

Ratio

Year

Ratio

1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911

1.06
1.04
1.01
1.11
1.04
0.92
1.04
1.08
1.11
1.00
0.96
1.08
1.13
0.99
1.07
1.05
1.12
1.12
1.01
0.99
0.95
0.91
0.92
1.01
1.07
1.06
1.02

1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938

0.95
1.00
1.16
1.08
0.91
0.82
0.83
0.93
1.11
1.20
1.27
1.36
1.35
1.29
1.33
1.26
1.21
1.19
1.13
1.03
0.87
0.80
0.80
0.83
0.80
0.79
0.81

Table A2.4.
Year
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912

Source: See text in Appendix 2.

Wage/land rent ratios, 1885-1939
Ratio
1.31
1.10
1.07
1.01
0.96
0.91
0.90
0.90
0.89
0.89
0.91
1.02
1.17
1.27
1.15
1.21
1.19
1.07
1.00
1.08
1.15
1.08
1.08
1.19
1.45
1.40
1.11
0.92

Source: See text in Appendix 2.

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Year
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939

Ratio
1.00
1.57
1.50
1.40
1.09
0.90
1.02
1.50
1.68
2.36
2.07
1.81
1.97
2.09
2.34
2.40
2.40
2.97
2.38
1.81
1.86
1.39
1.47
1.53
1.46
1.65
1.78

Income Growth and Inequality over The Very Long Run

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