Global Income Inequality, c1880-1960

This project will calculate new estimates of world inequality in the period from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, based on the results of household expenditure surveys. The current consensus is that all of the post-industrial revolution increase in inequality amongst world citizens occurred before about 1950. This conclusion has largely been reached on the basis of the analysis of global measures of inequality derived from the national accounts in conjunction with various proxy measures. This project takes a different approach. We plan to investigate inequality in this period using much better, household level, data. There are strong arguments, advocated by the World Bank among others, for investigating inequality using evidence from household surveys suitably adjusted for cost of living differences. This has not generally been carried out for the pre-1950 period at a global level, possibly because the extent of recoverable household expenditure survey evidence has not been fully appreciated. Our investigations have located a vast cache of household expenditure surveys for the period. Thus far, we have identified around 800 household surveys from around the world, carried out between the 1880s and 1960s, of which around 381 are of sufficient scope as to be potentially useful for the investigation of inequality. The geographical spread of these surveys is truly global: 71 from Western Europe; 10 from Eastern Europe; 53 from South and Central America; 37 from Africa and the Caribbean; 88 from Asia; 7 from the Middle East, 110 from North America and 5 from Australia and Polynesia.

We will extract the reported demographic and expenditure data by income group from these reports and use them to estimate parameters of the income distribution. Using these estimates, we will investigate the changing nature of inequality within a number of key nation states, and also investigate the time path and geography of global inequality 1880-1960. In addition, we would use these data to estimate other indicators of living conditions, such as nutritional attainment, which may provide further insights into the impact of industrialisation on inequality. The research outlined in this proposal is likely to transform our understanding of the history of global living standards during the first half of the twentieth century and the distributional consequences of long-term economic growth. It has the potential, equally, to transform our understanding of policy designed to reduce inequality. The project will also bequeath a collection of data-sets with significant potential for future use.

We plan a partnership with The National Archives Education Department to disseminate the results of our research to history secondary school pupils from the UK, with secondary school teachers acting as agents for knowledge transfer. In partnership with The National Archives Education Department, we have developed a Teacher-Scholar programme for History teachers for our earlier British Living Standards Project. Building on the success of this scheme (link to BLS website report) we plan a similar scheme. In year 4 of the project, a cohort of teachers will engage with the project's original databases, and the project's research findings, to develop lesson plans relating to world inequality. The analysis of inequality, and how that has changed since the end of the nineteenth century, could be adopted as part of the History National Curriculum 'World Study after 1900' module. These lesson plans will be available through the project's web page, the TNA Education webpage and will be freely downloadable to any school teacher in the UK.The TNA Education website currently has in the order of 9 million hits per annum. It will be possible to provide precise quantitative records of the number of lesson plans downloaded. The effectiveness of this scheme will be independently evaluated by an external academic evaluator.

The outreach project is targeted at Key Stage 3, 4 and 5 secondary school history students in the UK. In 2012, there were over 220,000 GCSE History candidates and 49,000 'A' Level History candidates. In our view, the most effective way of informing these students is through their teachers and History teachers' professional associations. The primary professional organisation for History teachers is the Historical Association, which has a membership of over 4,500 teachers in both primary and secondary education and a further 1,500 individuals in higher education and the wider history community. We plan a plenary session at the HA 2016 conference that will showcase the results of our Teacher-Scholar programme. The Head of Education at TNA, Andrew Payne, would act as internal advocate and provide liaison with the Sussex team.