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

Author(s): Osamu Saito
Subject(s): Supranational / Global Economy, Socio-Economic Research
Published by: Hokkaido Slavic-Eurasian Reserarch Center
Summary/Abstract: 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, and hence 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). 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 nineteenth century, to the Europe-Japan comparison, the paper will examine the three countries’ early modern social tables, and how they changed over time with special reference to trends in growth and inequalityin the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s.

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