Historical wage and income data provide both normative measures of living standards, and indicators of patterns of economic development. This study shows that, given limited historical data, median incomes are most appropriate for measuring welfare and inequality, while urban unskilled wages can be used to test dualist models of development. We present new estimates of these series for Mexico from 1800 to 2015 and find that both have historically failed to keep up with aggregate growth: GDP per worker is now over eight times higher than in the nineteenth century, while unskilled urban real wages are only 2.2 times higher, and national median incomes only 2.0 times higher. From the perspective of inequality and social welfare, our findings confirm that there is no automatic positive relationship between economic growth and rising living standards for the majority. From the perspective of development, we argue that these findings are explained by a dual economy model incorporating Lewis's assumption of a reserve army of labour, and we explain why the decline in inequality predicted by Kuznets has not occurred.

中文翻译：

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不平等、生活水平和增长：墨西哥两个世纪的经济发展†

历史工资和收入数据既提供了生活水平的规范衡量标准，也提供了经济发展模式的指标。本研究表明，鉴于历史数据有限，收入中位数最适合衡量福利和不平等，而城市非技术人员工资可用于检验二元发展模型。我们对墨西哥从 1800 年到 2015 年的这些序列进行了新的估计，发现两者在历史上都未能跟上总体增长：现在人均 GDP 是 19 世纪的八倍多，而城市非技术工人的实际工资仅为 2.2数倍，而全国收入中位数仅高出 2.0 倍。从不平等和社会福利的角度来看，我们的调查结果证实，经济增长与大多数人的生活水平提高之间不存在自动的正相关关系。从发展的角度来看，我们认为这些发现是由二元经济模型解释的，该模型结合了刘易斯关于劳动力后备军的假设，我们解释了库兹涅茨预测的不平等程度下降的原因。