The Journal of Economic History
- The Journal of Economic History / Volume 74 / Issue 03 / September 2014, pp 767-798
- Copyright © The Economic History Association 2014
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002205071400059X (About DOI), Published online: 29 August 2014
Articles
Russian Inequality on the Eve of Revolution
Peter H. Linderta1a2 and Steven Nafzigera3
a1 Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis
a2 A Research Associate of the NBER, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail: phlindert@ucdavis.edu
a3 Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Williams College, 24 Hopkins Hall Drive, Williamstown, MA 01267. E-mail: steven.nafziger@williams.edu.
Abstract
Careful handling of an eclectic data set reveals how unequal were the incomes of different classes of Russians on the eve of Revolution. We estimate incomes by economic and social class in each of the fifty provinces of European Russia. On the eve of military defeat and the 1905 Revolution, Russian income inequality was middling by the standards of that era, and less severe than is inequality today in China, the United States, and Russia itself. We note how the interplay of some distinctive fiscal and relative-price features of Imperial Russia might have shaped the now-revealed level of inequality.
Footnotes
This article presents results from an open-source research project. As much as possible, the data are being posted on http://gpih.ucdavis.edu (click on the main data list folder, scroll to Eastern Europe). We thank the U.S. National Science Foundation for support under grants 0922531 and 1227237, and acknowledge the helpful comments of participants in the March 2011 conference on “Quantifying Long-Run Economic Development” at The University of Warwick in Venice, and at the World Economic History Congress in Stellenbosch, July 2012. Aaron Seong, Stefan Ward-Wheten, and Nikolas Zolas provided excellent research assistance.
