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16 - Consequences of Growth: Living Standards and Inequality

from Part II - Factors Governing Differential Outcomes in the Global Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2021

By
Jan Luiten van Zanden ,
Bas van Leeuwen  and
Yi Xu
Edited by
Stephen Broadberry  and
Kyoji Fukao
Stephen Broadberry
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Kyoji Fukao
Affiliation:
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo
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Summary

This chapter discusses the consequences of industrialization and growth for the standard of living of the world’s population. The estimates concerning GDP growth, life expectancy, and educational attainment are discussed and an inequality-adjusted human development index is constructed and presented. At the onset of the process of modern economic growth in 1800 there were already large differences in well-being between the advanced economies in Europe and North America and the rest of the world, which further widened during the ninteenth century. This widening was the result of faster growth of the core economies; only rarely did countries show a substantial decline. The decrease of GDP per capita in China between 1700 and 1900 is a rare exception to this rule.

Keywords

living standardGreat Divergenceeconomic growthwell-beinglife expectancyeducation
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World , pp. 391 - 411
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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