Spanish subsistence wages and the Little Divergence in Europe, 1500–1800

Abstract This paper suggests an alternative view of Europe’s Little Divergence in real wages. It presents a new dataset of prices and wages for Spain and proposes a new way of measuring the cost of bare-bones subsistence. The substitution of brown-bread prices for grain prices in the baskets transforms the scale and chronology of the divergence between North-western Europe and Spain.

The results show that it began later and that unskilled subsistence wages in London and Amsterdam were significantly lower than those calculated by the canonical model, which would nuance the “high-wage” hypothesis.