How Equality Created Poverty in Preindustrial Japan, 1600–1870

Despite well-developed economic institutions, premodern Japan, 1600–1868, had among the lowest real wages according to available estimates, around half those in preindustrial England. However, many Japanese peasants owned land, unlike their mostly landless English counterparts, due to institutional differences in land inheritance. Using a Malthusian model, I show that this greater landownership equality paradoxically led to Japan's lower wages and GDP per capita. Evidence from Japanese village censuses supports the mechanism. If, as many historians believe, high wages in Western Europe spurred industrialization, Japan's failure to industrialize first could have been shaped by its unusual preindustrial equality. (JEL D63, E23, J31, N15, N35, N45, N55)