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History And Economics Notes Chinese Economic History Since 1850 Notes

Week 3 Reading Baten Et Al. Notes

Updated Week 3 Reading Baten Et Al. Notes

Chinese Economic History Since 1850 Notes

Chinese Economic History Since 1850

Approximately 215 pages

These notes and other materials cover the EH207: The Making of an Economic Superpower: China since 1850.

"This course provides a survey of long-term economic change in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It focuses on China's long path to becoming a major global economic power at the beginning of the new millennium. The course examines the importance of ideological and institutional change in bringing about economic transformations by surveying major historical turning points s...

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Introduction

  • Rapid accumulation of physical and human capital led to East Asia catch-up after WWII

  • Lack of systematic and comparable data for China

  • Decline in living standards and human capital after mid 19th century

    • Recovery at turn of the century

  • Data suggests that living standards were similar to backward parts of Europe in 18th and 19th century

    • Confirming the traditional view

    • Contrary to revisionism (Pomeranz 2000, Lee et al. 2002)

      • Claim Asian living standards on par with Europe in 18th century

  • However, age heaping index (numerical abilities) data shows Chinese human capital was closer to North-Western Europe

  • Low living standards vs. high human capital

Real Wage

  • GDP per capita does not capture non-market income

    • Important in developing economies

  • Attempts by Allen, Bassino, Ma, Moll-Murata and van Zanden (2007) attempt to use real wage to fill data for China in 18th and 19th centuries

    • Focuses on wage histories of Canton, Beijing, and lower Yangzi

    • Criticism: Focuses only on urban unskilled workers

      • Is this representative and comparable?

      • But it is probably the best we have available

  • Divergence in living standards of workers in urban centres of China from Netherlands and England in 18th century

    • However, places like Milan were at a similar level to China

  • Second divergence = Backward parts of Europe and Japan crept ahead of China and London increase it’s divergence

  • Gamble (1943) data spans entire 19th Century

    • Useful because it was a time of ‘economic dislocation’

      • E.g. Taiping Revolution

Heights

  • Important complementary measure of living standards (Fogel, Komlos et al.)

    • Capture biological component of wealth

      • E.g. health, life expectancy, quality of nutrition

    • Particularly sensitive to economic inequalities

  • However, must take care in interpreting this data

    • Differences in intergenerational height transmission and nutritional habits which are not directly related to economic scarcities

  • Convergence of Chinese heights to the European and North American level more recently

  • Data taken by measuring migrants, prisoners and employees of government organizations in China

    • But region of birth was mainly the south (particularly Guangdong)...

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