Wu Qiang, Tong Guangyu, Zhou Peng
University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China.
Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2025 Jan 24;20(1):e0315627. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0315627. eCollection 2025.
This paper attempts to describe and explain the long-term evolution of wage inequality in imperial China, covering over two millennia from the Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty (202 BCE-1912 CE). Based on historical government records of official salaries, commodity prices, and agricultural productivity, we convert various forms of salaries to equivalent rice volumes and comparable salary benchmarks. Wage inequality is measured by salary ratios and (partial) Gini coefficients between official and peasant classes as well as within the official class. The inter-class wage inequality features an "inverted U-u" pattern-first rose before the Tang dynasty and then declined afterwards (the "inverted U" trends) with "inverted u" dynastic cycles. The intra-class wage inequality has a secular decline trend. We propose a unified framework incorporating technological, institutional, political, and social (TIPS) mechanisms to explain both long-term and short-term patterns. It is concluded that the technological mechanism dominated the rise of wage inequality, while the political mechanism (emperor-bureaucracy power tensions) drove the decline.
本文试图描述和解释帝制中国工资不平等的长期演变，涵盖从汉朝到清朝（公元前202年至公元1912年）的两千多年。基于官方俸禄、商品价格和农业生产率的历史政府记录，我们将各种形式的俸禄换算为等量的大米数量和可比的俸禄基准。工资不平等通过官员与农民阶级之间以及官员阶级内部的俸禄比率和（部分）基尼系数来衡量。阶级间工资不平等呈现出“倒U-u”模式——在唐朝之前先上升，之后下降（“倒U”趋势），且存在“倒u”的朝代周期。阶级内工资不平等呈长期下降趋势。我们提出了一个包含技术、制度、政治和社会（TIPS）机制的统一框架，以解释长期和短期模式。研究得出结论，技术机制主导了工资不平等的上升，而政治机制（皇帝与官僚权力紧张关系）推动了工资不平等的下降。
