REAL INEQUALITY IN EUROPE SINCE 1500

Philip T. Hoffman · David S. Jacks · Patricia A. Levin · Peter H. Lindert

268 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of Economic History

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Historical Economic and Social Studies Income, Poverty, and Inequality Economic Theory and Policy

Abstract

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. Relative prices affected real inequality more strongly in earlier centuries than in the twentieth. Between 1500 and about 1800, staple food and fuels became dearer, while luxury goods, especially servants, became cheaper, greatly widening the inequality of lifestyles. Peace, industrialization, and globalization reversed this inegalitarian price effect in the nineteenth century, at least for England.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 268 citations exist upstream.

References

2019Economic Growth and Income Inequality 1996Monitoring the world economy, 1820-1992 2000The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy 1994New product varieties and the measurement of international prices 2001The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War 2001Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy 1973National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom 1855-1965.1956The Analysis of Family Budgets

Cited by

2012The rise and fall of Spain (1270–1850) 1 2015Economic Inequality in Northwestern Italy: A Long-Term View (Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)2004Progress, decline, growth: product and productivity in Italian agriculture, 1000–2000 2007GDP per capita or real wages? Making sense of conflicting views on pre-industrial Europe 2017Long‐term trends in economic inequality: the case of the Florentine state, c. 1300–1800

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.