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Measuring Living Standards in Different Colonial Systems: Some Evidence from South East Asia, 1900–1942

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2012

ANNE BOOTH
ANNE BOOTH*
Affiliation:
University of London Email: ab10@soas.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper investigates the evidence on living standards in colonial economies, with particular reference to South East Asia in the decades from 1900 to 1942. Various measures are investigated, including availability of basic needs, demographic indicators, especially mortality rates, anthropometric measures and wage data. The paper concludes that in spite of the growth in GDP which occurred in most parts of the region between 1900 and 1940, improvements in living standards were modest, and by the late 1930s most colonies had low educational enrolments and high mortality rates. The Philippines had probably the highest living standards in the region, using educational indicators, mortality rates and per capita GDP estimates. But even in the Philippines rice availability per capita was low, and nutritional levels among some segments of the population were also below acceptable standards.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 5 , September 2012 , pp. 1145 - 1181
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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62 Szreter and Mooney have shown that expectations of life at birth in most of the large industrial cities in Britain were well below the national average for the five decades from 1851 to 1900. See Szreter, Simon and Mooney, Graham (1998), Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities, Economic History Review, 51 (1): 84–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Vlieland, British Malaya, p. 110. It is possible that the high infant mortality rates in Singapore reflect the fact that Chinese migrants, who accounted for a high percentage of the island's population, brought traditional infant and child care practices with them from China, and these contributed to the high mortality rates. But Smith gives figures on infant mortality rates calculated from registration statistics for 1933–1937 for the ‘Malaysian’ (Malay and Indonesian migrant) populations in various parts of British Malaya. The estimates for Singapore were higher than for most other states. See Smith, T. E., Population Growth in Malaya: An Analysis of Recent Trends, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, p. 54Google Scholar. This would suggest that overcrowded housing and poor sanitation facilities on the island were responsible, at least in part, for the high mortality rates. A detailed discussion of housing conditions in Singapore in 1953–1954 is given in Goh, Keng-Swee (1956), Urban Incomes and Housing: A Report on the Social Survey of Singapore, 1953–54, Government Printing Office, Singapore, Chapter 4Google Scholar. He found that less than one-fifth of the population surveyed had exclusive use of their house, and nearly 25 per cent lived in houses with eleven or more occupants. It is unlikely that conditions were much better in the late 1930s.

64 Gooszen, A Demographic History p. 192; and Banens, Maks (2000), ‘Vietnam: A Reconstruction of its twentieth Century Population History’ in Bassino, Jean-Pascal, Giacometti, Jean-Dominique and Odaka, K. (Eds), Quantitative Economic History of Vietnam 1900–1990, Tokyo: Hitotsubashi University, Institute of Economic Research, p. 36Google Scholar.

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70 Manderson, Sickness and the State, pp.130–137.

71 Ibid., p. 216.

72 Brand, Sterfteverhoudingen, p. 265.

73 Ibid., p. 256.

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75 Concepcion, Isabelo (1933), The Physical Growth of Filipinos, Institute of Pacific Relations, Manila. p. 14Google Scholar.

76 Ibid., Physical Growth, pp. 14–15.

77 Maddison, Angus (2005), Measuring and Interpreting World Economic Performance 1500–2001, Review of Income and Wealth, Series 51 (1), 1–35, p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Williamson, Jeffrey G. (1998), Real Wages and Relative Factor Prices in the Third World, 1820–1940; Asia, Discussion Paper No. 1844, Harvard Institute of Economic Research, Harvard University 1998Google Scholar; Williamson, Jeffrey G. (2000), ‘Globalization, factor prices and living standards in Asia before 1940’ in Latham, A. J. H. and Kawakatsu, Heita (Eds), Asia Pacific Dynamism, 1550–2000, Routledge, London, pp. 13–45Google Scholar.

79 Booth, Colonial Legacies, pp. 141–145.

80 Indonesia: Central Bureau of Statistics (1975), 1971 Population Census, Population of Indonesia, Series D, Central Bureau of Statistics, Jakarta, p. 246Google Scholar; Philippines: Bureau of Census and Statistics (1971), Yearbook of Philippine Statistics, 1969, Bureau of Census and Statistics, Manila, p. 144Google Scholar; Thailand: National Statistical Office (1971), Report of the Labour Force Survey, Office of the Prime Minister, National Statistical Office, Bangkok, Tables 7A and 7BGoogle Scholar.

81 Williamson, ‘Globalization’ Table 1.2.

82 See Kurihara, Kenneth, (1945), Labor in the Philippine Economy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 42–43Google Scholar. Minimum wage regulations were introduced in Indochina in 1936; there were no minimum wages in The Netherlands Indies although the Coolie Ordinance of 1931 did stipulate some regulations regarding the level of wages relative to living costs. The Thai government, although independent and a member of the International Labour Office, did not ratify any of the International Labour Office conventions in the inter-war era, probably because the great majority of wage workers were of Chinese origin. See Thompson, Labor Problems, p. 230. In Britain, a Colonial Office Labour Committee was established in 1930 ‘largely to deal with the applications of International Labour Office. Conventions in dependent territories’. See Parmer, N. J. (1960), Colonial Labor Policy and Administration: A History of Labor in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya, c. 1910–1941, J. J. Augustin, Locust Valley, p. 264Google Scholar. During the 1930s, as labour unrest mounted in various parts of Asia and Africa, the Colonial Office was forced to give more attention to employment conditions and to the enforcement of labour standards.

83 Booth, Colonial Legacies, Table 3.11.

84 Owen series: Owen, Norman G. (1984), Prosperity Without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial Philippines, University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 47–52Google Scholar; Williamson series and cost of living index: Williamson, Jeffrey G. (1998), Real Wages and Relative Factor Prices in the Third World, 1820–1940: Asia, Discussion Paper No. 1844, Harvard Institute of Economic Research, Harvard University 1998, pp. 273–274Google Scholar.

85 A recent critique of national income accounting can be found in Stiglitz, Joseph, Sen, Amartya and Fitoussi, Jean-Paul, Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up, The New Press, New York, especially Chapter 2Google Scholar.

86 See in particular Ranis, Stewart and Samman, Human Development, for an analysis of possible extensions. They identify eleven categories of human development in addition to the Human Development Index itself, although they concede that for many developing countries data on some of these categories are not available.

87 Crafts, N. F. R. (1997), ‘The human development index and changes in standards of living: some historical comparisons’, European Review of Economic History, 1, 299–322CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crafts, Nicholas (2002), ‘The human development index, 1870–1999: Some revised estimates’, European Review of Economic History, 6, 395–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Metzer, Jacob (1998), The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Astorga, Berges and Fitzgerald, The Standard of Living, Table A6, have estimated a historical living standard index for a number of Latin American countries over the twentieth century. Unlike the Human Development Index, it does not include educational enrolments. Their estimates of literacy in 1940 range from 44 per cent in Brazil to 73 per cent in Chile and Costa Rica; the estimate of 49 per cent derived from the Philippine Census in 1939 was thus lower than most of the countries for which they obtained data. On the other hand, the estimated life expectancy of 46 years in the Philippines was higher than in all the countries they examined except Costa Rica.

89 See, in particular, Bevoise, Ken de (1995), Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in Colonial Philippines, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. ix, 12–13Google Scholar. This author cites an oral history project carried out in the Philippines in the 1950s. Those who could remember the war at the turn of the century stressed the impact of disease, rather than deaths from fighting. Zablan attributed the very low estimate of life expectancy at birth for 1902 (made by the Bureau of Census and Statistics) to severe smallpox and cholera epidemics. See Zablan, Z. C. (1978), ‘Trends and Differentials in Mortality’ in Population of the Philippines, Country Monograph Series No. 5, United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, pp. 99–116Google Scholar. Corpuz compared populations from the Spanish census of 1887 with the American census of 1903. He found that 11 out of 30 provinces had population declines over these years. The area cultivated to rice and other food crops was also greatly reduced. See Corpuz, O. D. (1989), The Roots of the Filipino Nation, Volume 2, Aklahi Foundation, Quezon City, pp. 521–526Google Scholar. There is evidence that the problems afflicting the Philippines in the last decades of the nineteenth century were also found in other parts of South East Asia. A recent study of long-term trends in average heights of adults in Indonesia found evidence of declines in the three decades after 1870. These declines were attributed to a sequence of droughts, cholera epidemics, cattle plague and the devastation caused by the Krakatau eruption. See Baten, Joerg, Stegl, Mojgen and Eng, Pierre van der (2010), Long-Term Economic Growth and the Standard of Living in Indonesia, Working Papers in Economics and Econometrics No. 514, Australian National University, February, p. 15Google Scholar.

90 GDP data from Hooley, Richard (2005), American economic policy in the Philippines, 1902–1940: Exploring a dark age in colonial statistics, Journal of Asian Economics, 16, pp. 464–488CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Data from Table A1. Population data from Bureau of Census and Statistics (1941), Yearbook of Philippine Statistics, 1940, Bureau of Census and Statistics, Manila, p. 13Google Scholar; and National Economic and Development Authority (1978), The National Income Accounts, CY 1946–1975 (Link Series), National Economic and Development Authority, Manila, pp. 167–169Google Scholar. Life expectancy from Zablan, Trends, p. 105. Infant mortality from Wood, Leonard (1926), Report of the Governor General of the Philippine Islands 1924, Government Printing Office, Washington, p. 8Google Scholar; and Zablan, Trends, p. 105. Educational enrollments from Bureau of Census and Statistics (1960), Handbook of Philippine Statistics, 1903–1959, Bureau of Census and Statistics, Manila, pp. 23–28Google Scholar and National Economic and Development Authority (1976), NEDA Statistical Yearbook of the Philippines 1976, Manila: National Economic and Development Authority, Manila, Table 15.3Google Scholar. Rice availability data from Mears et al., The Rice Economy, pp. 355–356.

91 The available GDP estimates for South East Asia prior to 1960 are usually estimated from the production side, so even aggregate data on household consumption expenditures are not available. One of the recommendations of Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi, Mismeasuring, p. 56, is that consumption data rather than aggregate GDP should be used to track changes in material living standards. This is not possible for Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma or British Malaya, prior to the 1950s.

92 Williamson, Globalization, Table 1.7, estimates trends in real wages relative to trends in total GDP for nine Asian countries from 1870 to 1939. He argues that a fall in this ratio implies worsening distribution on the grounds that the relatively poor would be receiving more of their income as wages compared with the better-off. This seems questionable; it is arguable that those who got most or all of their incomes from wages could well have been among the better-off groups in many parts of Asia prior to 1940, and indeed more recently. In order to test trends in income inequality, we need comprehensive household income and expenditure surveys, and these were not carried out in Malaya or the Philippines until the 1950s. The evidence suggested high levels of inequality in both countries by 1960. See in particular Mangahas, M. (1975), ‘Income Inequality in the Philippines: A Decomposition Analysis’ in Income distribution, Employment and Economic Development in Southeast and East Asia, The Japan Economic Research Center, Tokyo, p. 304Google Scholar.

93 In Indonesia it has been estimated that the average level of education increased from 0.1 years in 1900 to 0.5 years by 1930 See van der Eng, Pierre (2001), ‘Indonesia's Economy and Standard of Living in the twentieth Century’ in Lloyd, Grayson and Smith, Shannon (Eds), Indonesia Today: Challenges of History, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, p. 191Google Scholar. While a five-fold increase might look impressive, the growth was from such a low level that by 1930 the great majority of the indigenous population had received no formal education.

94 Maddison himself stressed that his estimates were simply work in progress and subject to further revision. Since the publication of his 2003 compilation of GDP data, revisions to the estimates for Taiwan, Japan and Korea have been made by Fukao, K., Ma, Debin and Yuan, Tangjun (2005), International Comparison in Historical Perspective: Reconstructing the 1934–36 Benchmark Purchasing Power Parity for Japan, Korea and Taiwan, Discussion Paper Series 66, Hitotsubashi University Research Unit for Statistical and Empirical Analysis in the Social Sciences, TokyoGoogle Scholar. The estimates for the Philippines by Richard Hooley, which were used by Maddison, have recently been subject to revision by Eto. See Hooley, Richard (2005), American economic policy in the Philippines, 1902–1940: Exploring a dark age in colonial statistics, Journal of Asian Economics, 16, 464–488CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Eto, Keiya (2010), An Examination of the Statistical Data Sources of the Philippines: Notes on Estimating the Historical GDP of the Primary Industry (2), Discussion Paper Series 135, Hitotsubashi University Research Unit for Statistical and Empirical Analysis in the Social Sciences, TokyoGoogle Scholar.

95 Booth, Colonial Legacies, Table 4.4.

96 Ibid., pp. 68–75.