South African Living Standards in Global Perspective, 1835–1910

637

349

The Maddison Project, initiated in March 2010 by a group of close colleagues of Angus Maddison, aims to develop an effective system of cooperation between scholars to continue Maddison's work on measuring economic performance in the world economy. This article is a first product of the project. Its goal is to explain the aims and approach of the project, and, as a first result of this ‘collaboratory’, to inventory recent research on historical national accounts. We also briefly discuss some of the problems related to these historical statistics and we extend and where necessary revise the estimates published by Maddison in his latest overviews. Most new work relates to the period before 1820; it leads to a reassessment of levels of GDP per capita in western Europe in the early modern period, and to a confirmation of Maddison's previous estimates of Asian levels of real income.

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confidence: 99%

TheMaddisonProject: collaborative research on historical national accounts

Bolt

Zanden

2014

637

349

“…Bolt and Hillbom, ‘Potential for diversification?’; Bowden et al., ‘Measuring and explaining poverty’; de Zwart, ‘South African living standards’; Frankema and van Waijenburg, ‘Structural impediments’; Rönnbäck, ‘Pre‐colonial Gold Coast’.…”

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confidence: 99%

Measuring rural welfare in colonial Africa: did Uganda's smallholders thrive?

Haas

2016

Recent scholarship on historical welfare development in Sub‐Saharan Africa has uncovered long‐term trends in standards of living. How the majority of rural dwellers fared, however, remains largely elusive. This study develops a new approach to reconstruct rural living standards in a historical context. It builds upon a well‐established real wage literature, but moves beyond it to capture rural realities, employing sub‐national rural survey, census, and price data. The approach is applied to a case study of colonial and early post‐colonial Uganda (1915–70). The case study yields a number of findings. While the expanding smallholder‐based cash crop sector established itself as the backbone of Uganda's colonial economy, farm characteristics remained largely stagnant after the initial adoption of cash crops. Smallholders maintained living standards well above subsistence level, and while the profitability of cash crops was low, their cultivation provided a reliable source of cash income. Around the time of decolonization, unskilled wages rose rapidly while farm incomes lagged behind. As a result, an urban–rural income reversal took place. The study also reveals considerable differences within Uganda. Smallholders in Uganda's banana regions required fewer labour inputs to maintain a farm income than their grain‐farming counterparts, creating opportunities for additional income generation and livelihood diversification.

“…Hatton and Williamson, Global migration ; Belich, Replenishing the earth ; Magee and Thompson, Empire and globalisation ; de Zwart, ‘South African living standards’; Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune’; Sokoloff and Engerman, ‘Institutions’.…”

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confidence: 99%

South Africa in the Australian mirror: per capita real GDP in the Cape Colony, Natal, Victoria, and New South Wales, 1861–1909

Magee

Greyling

Verhoef

2016

This article compares the real GDP per capita of the Cape Colony and Natal between 1861 and 1909 with that of Australia's two most developed colonies, Victoria and New South Wales. Estimates of European and non‐European GDP per capita for both South African colonies are also provided. Together, this information allows for the first time an evaluation of the growth performance of these important parts of the South African economy in the colonial era. The article concludes that South African performance in this period was stronger than often assumed and that by the beginning of the twentieth century European South Africans, now more fully integrated into a British World economy, operated at a level of GDP per capita that matched and in some places may have exceeded that of Australians. Non‐European South Africans, however, did not share in these same advances.