Data and Code for How Equality Created Poverty

Despite its sophistication, Early Modern Japan, 1600-1868, had among the lowest real wage levels ever recorded, half of those in pre-industrial England. However, Japan had landowning peasants unlike their landless English counterparts due to institutional differences in land inheritance. Using a Malthusian model, I show this greater landownership equality paradoxically generated Japan’s lower wages and GDP per capita. I provide evidence of the mechanism using Japanese village censuses. If, as many historians believe, high wages in western Europe explain the onset of the Industrial Revolution, then Japan’s failure to industrialize first could have been shaped by its unusual pre-industrial equality.