This paper suggests an alternative view of Europe’s Little Divergence in real wages. It presents a new dataset of prices and wages for Spain and proposes a new way of measuring the cost of bare-bones subsistence. The substitution of brown-bread prices for grain prices in the baskets transforms the scale and chronology of the divergence between North-western Europe and Spain. The results show that it began later and that unskilled subsistence wages in London and Amsterdam were significantly lower than those calculated by the canonical model, which would nuance the “high-wage” hypothesis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.