The real urban wage in an agricultural economy without landless farmers: Serbia, 1862–1910^†

Abstract

This article presents the first estimates of the welfare ratio for Serbia using nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century data on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers (including the part paid in kind) and the prices of goods in ‘subsistence’ and ‘respectability’ consumption baskets. It finds stagnation in the unskilled wage, and a modest increase in the skilled wage. The article introduces several adjustments to conventional methodology in order to make it more relevant for predominantly agricultural societies.

Inequality in Pre‐Industrial Europe (1260–1850): New Evidence From the Labor Share

“…Allen himself (2017; 2020) and Zegarra (2021) have experimented with a more sophisticated approach for determining the basket, using linear programming given the prevailing prices. Scholars have also criticized Allen’s definition of cheapest source of calories for urban population (Lopez Losa and Piquero Zarauz, 2021), his assumptions about the composition of the household (Humphries, 2013; Mijatovic and Milanovic 2021; Horrell, Humphries and Weisdorf, 2021) and the individual caloric needs (Humphries, 2013; Allen, 2015) and the representativeness of wage series (Hatcher and Stephenson, 2018). However, an alternative standard has not yet emerged, and thus we will stick to the Allen’s original approach.…”