Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe

Book

Seventeen papers bring together evidence concerning living standards in pre-industrial Europe and Asia and shed new light on when the gap in living standards between the East and West first emerged. Papers examine standards of living in eighteenth-century China; farm labor productivity in Jiangnan, 1620-1850; wages, inequality, and pre-industrial growth in Japan, 1727-1894; agriculture, labor, and the standard of living in eighteenth-century India; long term patterns in real wages in Europe and Asia; the rise of real inequality in early modern Europe; the standard of living before the industrial revolution in the Western part of the Netherlands; economic growth, human capital formation, and consumption in Western Europe before 1800; average heights in Northern Europe over a millennium; physical and economic well-being of the Russian population in the eighteenth century; maternal mortality as an indicator of the standard of living in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Slavonia; the standard of living in Denmark in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; short-term demographic changes in relation to economic fluctuations in Tuscany, 1823-54; new evidence on the standard of living in Sweden during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; individuals and communities facing economic stress; living standards in Liaoning, 1749-1909; and demographic responses to short-term economic stress in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural Japan. Allen is at Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College. Bengtsson and Dribe are at Lund University. Index.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Place of publication: Oxford and New York
• Publication date: 2005-01-01
• Language: English