IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fth/harver/1844.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Real Wages and Relative Factor Prices in the Third World 1820-1940: Asia

Author

Listed:
  • Jeffrey G. Williamson

Abstract

By 1914, there were very big economic gaps between the European industrial core and countries around Asia, from Japan to what we now call Pakistan When did the gaps appear? Can they be explained by lags in the diffusion of the industrial revolution after 1780, or did the gaps appear much earlier? What about the first great globalization boom after about 1870? Which countries in Asia started catching up, which fell further behind, and which held their own? What role did globalization and demographic forces play? Conventional quantitative evidence, like Agnus Maddison's GDP data, is often too incomplete to confront these central questions. In an effort to suggest a new research agenda for the region, this essay uses a new data base on real wages and wage/rental ratios for thirteen major Asian regions -- Burma, China, India (North, South, East and West), Indonesia (Java and Outer Settlements), Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand. These thirteen regions, often documented from as early as 1820, form the data base for the paper, and they are well balanced among the three major areas consisting of South Asia (four), Southeast Asia (five) and East Asia (four) so that we can say something about "north-south gaps" within the region, as well as between it and the European core.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeffrey G. Williamson, 1998. "Real Wages and Relative Factor Prices in the Third World 1820-1940: Asia," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 1844, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:fth:harver:1844
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Blanca Sánchez‐Alonso, 2019. "The age of mass migration in Latin America," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 72(1), pages 3-31, February.
    2. Pablo Astorga Junquera, 2017. "Real Wages and Skill Premiums during Economic Development in Latin America," Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers _153, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    3. Paolo Malanima, 2020. "The limiting factor: energy, growth, and divergence, 1820–1913," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 73(2), pages 486-512, May.
    4. Williamson, Jeffrey G., 2017. "Philippine Inequality across the Twentieth Century: Slim Evidence but Fat Questions," CEPR Discussion Papers 12481, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Peter Mayer, 2006. "Trends of real income in Tiruchirapalli and the upper Kaveri Delta, 1819–1980," The Indian Economic & Social History Review, , vol. 43(3), pages 349-364, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fth:harver:1844. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ieharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.