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Inequality in the very long run: Malthus, Kuznets, and Ohlin

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Abstract

What happened to the inequality of real income and wealth before, during, and after the Industrial Revolution? Just as the usual Industrial Revolution era (1750-1850) has been revised by historians of economic growth, so too the articles in this issue follow the lead of Van Zanden (1995) in opening up a new inequality history for earlier eras and other continents. Three of them offer new evidence on European wealth and income inequality movements in pre-industrial and industrial epochs. The fourth offers a new perspective on Latin American experience since the late nineteenth century, reporting a twentieth-century experience quite unlike the Great Leveling that Kuznets and others saw in Europe and the USA from World War 1 to the 1970s.

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Correspondence to Jeffrey G. Williamson.

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Lindert, P.H., Williamson, J.G. Inequality in the very long run: Malthus, Kuznets, and Ohlin. Cliometrica 11, 289–295 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-016-0153-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-016-0153-6

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