All poor, but no paupers: a Japanese perspective on the Great Divergence
Professor Osamu Saito
Lecture 2. Household income and inequality
In the second lecture, an attempt is made to estimate the average household income by social class. A comparison of the results with the English and Indian cases shows that income inequality was substantially narrower in Tokugawa Japan than in Stuart England and also in Mughal India. The contrast with England, but not with India, is likely to have resulted in differences in per-capita output growth (higher in England, lower in Japan); however, it is also likely that market-led Smithian growth characterised both north-western Europe and Japan, but not India.
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