Morgan Stephen L
Department of Management, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Econ Hum Biol. 2004 Jun;2(2):197-218. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2004.03.002.
Recent scholarship has revised the once pessimistic view of the Chinese economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but controversy surrounds the distribution effects of economic growth. Did livelihoods improve? Who benefited from the growth? Which regions were better off? Past studies infer an improved standard of living based on sparse data for wages, the output of cotton textiles and movements in grain prices. Height data provide an additional measure of the change in welfare, specifically the biological standard of living. This paper draws on the health examination records conducted at various Chinese government enterprises and agencies during the 1930s and 1940s, and shows a modest improvement in this measure of human welfare in some regions of China from the 1890s to the 1920s.
最近的学术研究修正了曾经对19世纪末和20世纪初中国经济的悲观看法，但经济增长的分配效应仍存在争议。人们的生活水平提高了吗？谁从增长中受益？哪些地区的情况更好？过去的研究根据工资、棉纺织品产量和粮食价格变动等稀少数据推断生活水平有所提高。身高数据提供了衡量福利变化的另一种方式，特别是生物生活水平。本文利用20世纪30年代和40年代中国各政府企业和机构进行的健康检查记录，表明从19世纪90年代到20世纪20年代，中国某些地区的这一人类福利指标有适度改善。
