From Clio Infrastructure

Real Wages

There is considerable discussion about ‘alternative’ measures of economic performance, because GDP per capita is a simple average, and does not take distributional issues into account. Furthermore, GDP can not always be used in past economies.

Real wages – the purchasing power of the wage of an (often unskilled) labourer –is a useful alternative, as it is conceptually quite close to the GDP concept. Two ways of measuring real wages will be used; (1) purchasing power based on a basket of consumer goods, or (2) purchasing power based on one staple food, such as rice or wheat.

The hub offers material collected by Robert Allen, who developed a method to quantify the purchasing power of unskilled wage labourers in different parts of Europe since the late Middle Ages in an international comparative way. To this database has been added new research on real wages in Asia (Japan, India, China, Ottoman Empire/Turkey) over the period ca 1700-1939, and further extensions of the dataset are underway.

Visit the website of this hub.

Participant(s) involved

International Institute of Social History
Cruquiusweg 31
1019 AT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31 20 6685866
info@iisg.nl
http://www.iisg.nl