CVRCEK. Wages, Prices and Living Standards in the Habsburg Empire, 1827-1910

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THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY

VOLUME 73 MARCH 2013 NUMBER 1

Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in

the Habsburg Empire, 1827–1910

TOMAS CVRCEK

This article analyses a new series of prices and wages stretching back to 1827for the provinces of the Habsburg Empire. These real wage series are the first

continuous and consistent indicator of changing living standards in this part

of Europe during industrialization. They show that while the living standardsstagnated throughout the monarchy prior to 1850s, the West (unlik e the East)

was able to launch onto a path of continuous growth in the second half of the

century. The empire experienced little convergence onto the living standards of

its neighbors and even internally the convergence record is mixed.

he onset of industrialization and modern economic growth is

perhaps the most important event in modern economic history. It

has transformed, and is still transforming, the lives of millions through

long-term increase in living standards. In this process, the Habsburg

Empire was a latecomer and its success in achieving long-term economic

growth was uneven (Gerschenk ron 1977; Good and Ma 1999; Schulze

2000). The issue of modern economic growth is particularly relevant for

the empire because it has long been connected with its eventual demise

at the end of the First World War. We can divide the question ofgrowth and development into three aspects. First, did the empire

experience economic growth strong enough to improve the living

The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 73, No. 1 (March 2013). © The Economic History

Association. All rights reserved. doi: 10.1017/S0022050713000016.Tomas Cvrcek is Assistant Professor, John E. Walk er Department of Economics, 222 Sirrine

Hall, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634. E-mail: tcvrcek @clemson.edu.This article was written with the support of the Economic History Association’s Arthur H.

Cole Grant-In-Aid awarded in Spring 2010. Outstanding research assistance was provided byJacob Burgdorf, Jan Andre Graumann, Mila Kashcheeva, Alexander Klein, Michael Feng,Ond ej Flander k a, and Shyam Menon. I also thank Robert Allen, Jeremy Atack , Jorg Baten,

Howard Bodenhorn, Greg Clar k , Ulrich Pfister, Matthias Morys, Max-Stephan Schulze, PaulHohenberg, three anonymous referees, and many others for their aid and helpful suggestions. I

also thank Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin for k indly granting me access, through their website,to many rare and valuable historical documents. All errors are mine.

T



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standards of a large proportion of the population? Second, did growthlead to convergence in living standards within the empire or did it rather

increase disparities? Finally, was the growth strong enough so that theDual Monarchy could hope to catch up with the leaders of the day?This article tackles these questions by examining newly constructed

wage and price series. They provide a homogeneous set of province-specific measures of living standard for each year from 1827 to 1910.They represent the most detailed series for this part of Europe inexistence. Overall, the evidence suggests that economic growth, whilenot spectacular by European standards, began to trickle down to the

poorer strata of society in the second half of the nineteenth century

when the living standards in the western portion of the empire—butnot in the eastern one—increased by about 70 percent between 1850and 1910.

These new series cover a large part of Europe that had previously been a statistical terra incognita (see the map in Figure 1). Territorially,Austria-Hungary was the second largest country in Europe after Russiaand for most of the nineteenth century (until the formation of unitedGermany) also the second most populous (with 51.4 million inhabitantsliving on 676.000 km2 in 1910). From Bregenz on the Austrian-Swiss

border to Suceava in modern-day Romania, the empire stretched767 miles, which is equivalent to the aerial distance from the Atlanticcoast to St. Louis. Its North-South span of 579 miles is comparableto the distance from St. Louis to New Orleans. It consisted ofnumerous provinces ranging from the Duchy of Salzburg (with214.800 inhabitants living on 7,153 km2 in 1910) to Hungary proper(with 13.4 million living on 188.800 km2).1 After the First WorldWar, the empire fell apart and a host of new countries emerged. Eachhad its separate national economy and government statistics. Sincemany of the new countries’ borders overlapped with provincial bordersof the Habsburg era, the nineteenth century data can be linked up tomore recent information and provide valuable insights into the long-term development of specific areas as well as the whole region.

CENTRAL EUROPEAN ECONOMIC HISTORY IN A WIDER CONTEXT

The present estimates contribute to a long-standing endeavor

in economic history that aims to document the evolution of livingstandards of workers around the world (Allen 2001; Allen et al. 2011;

1 That is, without Transylvania and Banat.



Wages, Prices, and Living Standards 3

Cisleithania Transleithania Province Capital Province Capital

Lower Austria Vienna Hungary Budapest

Upper Austria Linz Transylvania SibiuSalzburg Salzburg Western Slovakia NitraTyrol Innsbruck Eastern Slovakia Košice

Vorarlberg Bregenz Croatia-Slavonia ZagrebStyria Graz Banat TimisoaraCarinthia Klagenfurt

Carniola Ljubljana

Littoral Trieste

Bohemia Prague

Moravia BrnoSilesia OpavaGalicia Lviv

Bukowina Czernowitz Separate territoryDalmatia Zadar Bosnia-Hercegovina Sarajevo

FIGURE 1MAP OF THE HABSBURG EMPIRE IN ITS 1914 BORDERS

Note: Not all provinces were in existence at all times. Bosnia-Hercegovina was an Austrian protectorate between 1878–1908, after which it was annexed. See Appendix 1 for details.Source: Wikimedia Commons. See the References.



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Lindert and Williamson 1983; Feinstein 1998; Se Yan 2008; Scholliers1989). Most recently, this effort has been promoted by the Global

Price and Income History Project.2

The focal point of this researcheffort is the controversy, raging since the 1840s, over the worker livingstandards during the Industrial Revolution. Many sources and kindsof evidence have been brought to bear on this question. The evidencefor Western-European countries is now extensive, while Central andEastern European record still has many gaps.

It is not for lack of trying. At the aggregate level, scholars haveassembled statistics on production and employment in agriculture(Sandgruber 1978), estimates of manufacturing and agricultural output

(Rudolph 1976; Komlos 1983) and of long-term growth of theHabsburg Empire (Kausel 1979; Schulze 2000). However, the outputnumbers are not calculated by region/province, beyond the basic split

between the two halves of the empire: Cisleithania and Transleithania.3

Those works that have produced estimates of GDP by provincerarely extend back beyond 1870 because sufficiently detailed datasources are lacking (Good and Ma 1998; Schulze 2007). Moreover,reconstructions of past GDP (and GDP per capita) are fraught withmany problems of definition and estimation (especially in the servicesector) and are quite demanding in terms of the component data(Guinanne 2009).

For the historical period in question, real wage series aretherefore a critical element in measuring the level and growth ofwelfare. Indeed, they constitute the best available evidence on livingstandards. Several attempts have been made to assess the price andwage development in the Habsburg Empire. On the price side, Bela vonJankovich’s (1923) unweighted index of wholesale prices of variousraw materials from 1867 to 1909 was an early but unsatisfactoryeffort (Good 1974). A. F. Pribram (1938) compiled various prices(up to 1914) and some wages (up to 1800) for Vienna and the

2 See http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/.3 By the Compromise of 1867 (Ausgleich in German, Kiyegyezes in Hungarian), the lands

of the Crown of St. Stephen obtained autonomy and came to be ruled from Budapest—withits own government, Parliament and administrative apparatus (see Figure 1 for information onwhich provinces belonged to which half of the monarchy). Only currency, tariffs, army, andforeign policy were joint with the Western provinces, ruled from Vienna. While most modern

English-speaking historiography refers to the two halves of the Dual Monarchy as “Austria” and“Hungary,” those labels are geographically imprecise and could lead to confusion later on inthe article (e.g., when I write of “Austrian provinces,” I refer only to those provinces that makeup modern-day Austrian republic, not to all the provinces then ruled from Vienna). Therefore,I use the two labels (cumbersome though they are) used by contemporaries: Cisleithania for theWestern part of the monarchy ruled from Vienna and Transleithania for the Eastern part ruledfrom Budapest.




Austrian provinces. He did not combine the prices into a price index buthis data were later used by Allen (2001) for his Viennese real wage

series. Vera Mühlpeck, Roman Sandgruber and Hannelore Woitek(1979) focused on the nineteenth century, constructing a price index forthe cities of Vienna, Linz, Graz, and Innsbruck from 1800 to 1914. Onlythe Viennese price index is a “full index” in that it includes housing,textiles, and other consumption items. For the other cities, the priceindices are based solely on foodstuffs. Sandgruber (1982) then usedthe full Viennese price index to calculate real wages of local masonsin the nineteenth century. David Good’s (1974) price index runs from1873 to 1914 but it also pertains only to Vienna and excludes rents.

Ji í Mat jek (1986) deflated the real wages of Bohemian and Moravianminers with an index that includes only bread and meat. A wealthof nineteenth century price information is available from the Galiciancities of Lviv (Lemberg, Lwow) and Krakow (Gorkiewicz 1950;Hoszowski 1934). These data were later used by Allen (2001) for theconstruction of local welfare ratios.

On the wage side, there has been some effort to look at thecross-sectional pattern in provincial wages reconstructed from thestatistics of the government’s accident insurance and sickness-insuranceadministrations (Mesch 1984; Rauchberg 1895).4 These data, however,rarely adjust wages for local price variation and they do not produceseries of real wages. Mat jek (1986) and Jaroslav Purš (1986) strive tocapture local variation in prices but they focus exclusively on the Czechlands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia).

The annual province-specific price and wage data presented in thisarticle fill an important gap. In doing so, they circumvent many of theshortcomings of other measures while also extending the data farther

back into history.

DATA SOURCES

This section describes the data sources in general terms andassesses their reliability; most of the technical details are relegated tothe Appendices. The backbone of the price series consists of two setsof sources. The first of these are the regular annual statistical series

published by the Viennese government from 1828 onward and by the

Budapest government from 1874 onward. These publications listedthe average annual prices (by province in Cisleithania and by county

4 Both the accident insurance and sickness insurance were, however, designed almost exclusivelyfor industrial workers and so they represent highly varying proportions of local population in each province.



6 Cvrcek

in Transleithania) for grains, legumes, rice, potatoes, beef, wine, beer,hard wood, and soft wood. Most prices were reported consistently

through time, although some changes in format and in provincial boundaries did take place. There are also a few cases when the publications change the definition of the reported prices. For example,in the Cisleithanian publications, prices reported after 1881 pertain to

provincial capitals as opposed to the provinces generally. Whereverthese changes so required, a consistent, continuous price series foreach province was reconstructed through interpolation and splicing.Specific details are in the online Appendix 2. Prices were collected and reported by local authorities who were

also entrusted with operating the trading locations in the various towns.The local data were then aggregated into provincial averages by thedeveloping central statistical service which pushed for standardization,regularity and reliability of the collected statistics. Where possible, Icross-checked the quoted prices against other sources, such asnewspapers, statistical year books published by certain towns orindividual provinces (Prague, Vienna, Budapest, province of Styria,

province of Croatia-Slavonia and so on).5 The evidence suggeststhat the local prices within a province were close enough that it makeslittle difference whether the averages were simple or weighted.6

The reported “market average prices” ( Markt-Durchschnittspreise)therefore seem to be good indicators of price variation between

provinces. The second crucial source is the work of Mühlpeck, Sandgruber,and Woitek (1979) (henceforth referred to as MSW). Their consumer

price indices for four Austrian cities (Vienna, Graz, Linz, andInnsbruck) span 1800 1914 and include 38 different goods. Forsome of the goods’ prices, they relied on the same official statistics thatI use (or a related source) but they also present continuous price seriesfor many staples of household consumption such as sugar, salt, soap,

5 For example, the weekly newspaper “Austria,” published between 1850 and 1870 bythe Central Statistical Commission, carried local grain, wood, and meat prices (as well as daywages) for various towns throughout the Habsburg Empire, and published them regularly eitherin quarterly or even monthly intervals. These prices came from the same local offices as the provincial averages in the annual publications but since the prices are town level, I can calculatean independent provincial average. It turns out that within provinces, the differences in price

between locations were not very large. Similarly, from 1894 to 1906 the main Cisleithanianstatistical publication, Österreichisches Statistisches Handbuch, started publishing grain, potato,and legume prices by town as opposed to province, which again allows for comparison betweenthe provincial average and the price in the provincial capital.

6 For two particular years, 1857 and 1900, I have also been able to plot local prices againstthe population size of market towns. This exercise revealed no systematic relationship between prices and size of town.




petroleum, and textiles which were not reported (or only very randomly)in the government publications. For five of these items (sugar, salt, soap,

petroleum, and textiles), I supplemented my local price indices with the price series from whichever Austrian town was closest to each province.For these items regional variation is thus limited to these four Austriancities included in MSW’s data.7 Since all of these five items togetherrepresent about 15 percent of the overall budget (see the followingsection), it is unlikely that this seriously compromises the local nature ofthe price indices. They were also easy to trade, which further reduces thescope for large price disparities across provinces for these five products.

Apart from these two main sources, I also relied on various local

publications. They are listed in Appendix 2. For certain goods in certain periods, prices had to be interpolated. For example, from 1882 to 1893the statistical publications report wheat, rye, and oat prices only for provincial capitals and not for the province as a whole. One couldreasonably expect that the capital would be somewhat more expensivethat the countryside and so presuming the capital prices equal to the levelin the province in general would overestimate the cost of living in the province. I therefore adjust the capital prices downward, using theaverage difference between capital and provincial prices in years1877 1881 and 1894 1898. I used the same method across all provincesand goods.

Of course, shortcomings remain in the series. There is very littleinformation, for example, about the changing quality of goods consumed.This is particularly pressing in case of housing which has always beena very heterogeneous product and which improved considerably duringthe nineteenth century (in terms of indoor plumbing, constructionmaterials, ventilation and so on). The same applies to clothing whoselong-term trend was one of falling prices and—one may surmise—risingquantities and quality. There is very little that can be done about this, beyond assessing various scenarios highlighting how our conclusionsdepend on changing assumptions about these unobserved influences.Overall, however, the series are both detailed and robust.

CALCULATING THE COST OF LIVING

The consumption basket employed in this article consists of

twenty-one items: wheat bread, rye bread, oats, rice, butter, milk, potatoes, peas, beans, lentils, wine, beer, beef, sugar, salt, tobacco, heat

7 Specifically, Bohemian price index uses Linz prices for these five goods; Moravian andSilesian uses Viennese prices; Carinthia and Carniola use Graz prices.



8 Cvrcek

(equated with the cheapest source of 1 BTU from among hardwood,softwood, and coal), light (the cheaper of tallow and petroleum), soap,

textiles, and rent. This is a basket comparable to that of CharlesFeinstein (1998) for British workers, which includes 19 items. It isnarrower than the 38 goods included by MSW but nevertheless coversabout 80 percent of the expenditures in the MSW basket.8 Moreover,many of the additional items in the MSW basket are reasonably closesubstitutes to some item or other in my basket (for example, pork and

beef). Table 1 provides some information about the changing compositionof worker households’ consumption in Europe of the nineteenth century,

and thus about the weight each good in the basket should receive.These are shares of overall expenditures for certain broadly definedconsumption categories. Note that some of the reported budgets are basedon a sample of one (for example, Le Play’s) and their information value,if taken in isolation, is practically zero. But placed in the context of arange of budget studies from the time period, it appears that the budgetshares were relatively stable across time and space and even occupation.While the budgets are from around Europe, many of them come from theformer Habsburg Empire. They show that the Central-European budgetswere similar to those found elsewhere. Food consistently took up overhalf of worker families’ budgets while textiles and housing hoveredaround 10 percent (more in large cities, especially St. Petersburg). Theunweighted average for the budget shares is shown in the penultimaterow. The weights that I use appear at the bottom line of the table.

Shares alone are enough to construct a price index for each province but they do not allow us to compare the cost of a givenconsumption basket across provinces. To do so, I specify the actualabsolute quantities of foodstuffs consumed. Such absolute quantitiesare much harder to come by and they vary more than budgetshares both geographically and over time. Table 2 gives a glimpse ofthis. Clearly, some substitution was taking place across the nineteenthcentury as new consumption items were introduced and old ones fellout of favor. Moreover, local conditions affected, for example, theconsumption of pork vs. beef, wine vs. beer and so on. Practically, Itake Allen (2001, 2009) as a point of departure, since my investigationis close in spirit to his. The Allen consumption basket is a good but not

8 MSW also include three other kinds of meat, rolls and pastry, cheese, newspapers, andvarious taxes and fees.




TABLE 1BUDGET SHARES OF MAJOR CONSUMPTION GROUPS IN PERCENT (1700s 1912)

Occupation and Location Year F o o d s a n d

B e v e r a g e s

H o u s i n g

C l o t h i n g

F u e l

L i g h t

C e a n i n g & P e r

s .

H y g i e n e

O t h e r E x p e n s e s

Workers in NW Europe late 18th c. 78.8 5.0 4.6 4.4 6.9 0.1 0.2

36 worker Budgets, Europe 1829 1854 59.7 8.2 17.3 5.0 1.9 7.9

76 worker budgets, Britain 1840 1854 65.0 10.5 6.0 4.5 4.5 9.5

Miner, Idria, Carniola 1846 56.6 4.8 13.3 4.5 1.4 0.5 18.9Caster, Slovakia 1846 56.9 3.9 19.8 2.5 0.6 0.1 16.2

Peasant, Hungary 1846 60.6 4.4 12.1 4.4 1.0 1.0 16.5

Factory workers, Zwickau, N. Bohemia

1847 66.7 3.3 10.0 15.8 4.2 NA 0.0

Cotton weaver, (family of 5) N. Bohemia

1847 69.6 6.9 11.7 3.5 4.1 1.4 2.8

Carpenter, Vienna 1853 63.5 14.4 5.7 3.5 2.7 5.3 4.9

235 worker budgets, Belgium 1853 65.8 8.8 13.3 5.5 3.3 3.3

Various workers, Britain 1858 1862 73.0 13.0 9.0 4.0 1.0 NA 0.0

Ind. workers (family of 4),Vienna

1869 54.9 20.1 12.5 5.0 7.5

62 miners & metal workers,Prussian Silesia

1875 60.6 7.0 15.6 4.6 NA 12.2

235 factory workers,Prussian Silesia

1876 61.0 7.6 13.6 7.1 NA 10.7

33 budget studies, Germany 1829 1883 59.4 9.9 13.3 5.5 3.4 8.5

16 factory workers, N. Bohemia 1882 1883 64.0 9.4 10.5 8.2 4.6 3.3

Worker families, St Petersburg 1907/08 53.8 20.7 12.2 3.9 3.3 6.1

Workers, Vienna 1910

1912 59.4 14.8 9.2 4.4 0.2 2.8 9.2Average 62.7 9.6 11.7 4.0 2.0 2.3 7.7

Budget for this article 66.0 10.0 9.0 6.0 3.0 5.0 1.0

Note: Source for the budgets come (starting from the first line) Allen (2009, tab. 2.1); Gruber(1887); Horrell (1996, tab. 5); Le Play (1879); MGS XVI (1869, p. 55); Purš (1986, p. 86);Feinstein (1998); MSW, tabelle A 9.5; Singer (1885, p. 128); Mironov (2010); MSW.

a perfect fit for my purposes because it is clearly a premodern one, based on the consumption patterns of North-West European workers in

the late 1700s. It does not contain sugar or potatoes or rice (about 10 percent in my budget). But, usefully, underpinning Allen’s (2009)consumption values are not only observed consumption patterns but



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TABLE 2QUANTITIES OF FOOD CONSUMED

Location and Time Period NW Europe,

late 18th c.

HabsburgEmpire,1860

North BohemianMiners,1890 1897

Vienna,1910 1912

Cereals total (kg) 234.0 158.6 228.0 115.5

Potatoes (kg) 0.0 66.4 180.0 35.1

Meats and Fats (kg) 26.0 25.6 44.4 34.9

Staples total (kg) 260.0 250.6 452.4 185.5

Legumes/Pulses (kg) 39.0 0.0 12.0 2.5

Other vegetables and fruits (kg) 0.0 66.6 0.0 0.0

Fruits and vegetables total (kg) 39.0 66.6 12.0 2.5

Foods total (kg) 299.0 317.2 464.4 188.0Milk and Cheese (l) 5.2 8.3 108.0 142.5

Wine and Beer and Spirits (l) 182.0 74.6 0.0 56.4

Total drinks (l) 187.2 82.9 108.0 198.9

Note: The 1860 numbers pertain to average per capita consumption calculated from total production and net imports and population. The 1890–1897 numbers came from a study intoworker living standards, conducted by the management of a mining company. The 1910–1912values also come from a survey of working-class households.Sources: Allen (2009) for NW Europe, MSW for the Habsburg Empire in 1860 and Vienna,1910 1912. SAS stands for Severoeská akciová spolenost v Most (Nordböhmische Kohlen-werks Gesselschaft in Brux), see archival location of the source in References.

also considerations of necessary caloric and protein intake, which act asa suitable anchor for the values. As can be seen in Table 3, I haveenhanced Allen’s consumption basket by increasing the cerealconsumption and by including sugar and rice. In setting these lattervalues, I took into consideration the consumption per capita reported inMSW for Viennese workers in 1910–1912. Among beverages, Iincreased the consumption of milk at the expense of beer and wine.

Unfortunately, I do not have any prices for fruits and vegetables otherthan the pulses reported in Table 3. Although the basket is deficient inthis respect, the omission is at most of minor consequence becausefruits and vegetables did not usually constitute a large proportion ofhousehold budgets. Together, the food quantities in Table 3 represent66 percent of the budget while the shares of other items are given in the

bottom line of Table 1. Charles Feinstein (1998, p. 634) argues that a “fixed-weight(Laspeyres) index is taken to be the most suitable procedure for

measuring long-run changes in workers’ cost of living” and citesPaul David and Peter Solar (1977) in support of this view. His is an




TABLE 3CONSUMPTION BASKET

(food items)

Item

NW Europe,Late 18thCentury

Habsburg Empire,1827–1910

Quantities QuantitiesBudget Shares

(%)

Wheat bread (kg)

234

40 5.5

Rye bread (kg) 200 18.5

Oatmeal (kg) 10 1.5

Rice (kg) 0 5 1.0

Butter (kg) 5.2 4 3.5

Milk (lit) 5.2 65 4.8

Potatoes (kg) 0 61 5.0

Peas (kg)

39

1.8 0.9

Beans (kg) 3 1.5

Lentils (kg) 1.5 0.8

Wine (lit) 0 10 2.0

Beer (lit) 182 100 7.0

Beef (kg) 26 30 10.0

Sugar (kg) NA 9 3.0

Salt (kg) NA 11 1.0

Notes: The North-West European basket is based on consumption in Britain and Low Countries.The other two columns represent the food items in the Habsburg basket, used in the cost ofliving calculations in this article. Together, they represent 66 percent of the total Central-

European budget, with the shares of nonfood items cited in the bottom row of Table 1.Sources: Allen (2009, p. 36).

arithmetic index which, as Allen (2001, p. 424) and Gregory Clark(2001) point out, implicitly assumes Leontief preferences and allowsconsumers no room to adjust consumption in reaction to changing

prices. A geometric index, i.e., a geometric average of price relativesweighted by fixed consumption shares, implicitly presupposes Cobb-Douglas preferences, which allows the quantity consumed to vary with

price. My analysis relies upon a fixed-weight index, following Feinstein(1998), but I calculate it as a geometric average to reflect Allen’s andClark’s point. This yields a price index for each province with the years1898–1902 serving as the base. In order to be able to compare costs of



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living across provinces, I also calculate cross-sectional price relatives ineach province and Vienna in 1898–1902 and I multiply each local

provincial index by a geometric average of the cross-sectional pricerelatives in these five years. In this way, Viennese cost of living in1898–1902 constitutes the base index value of 100 against which allyears and all provinces are compared. Finally, to obtain a “Krone-value” of annual living expenses in each province and year, I multiplythe index by the cost of the consumption basket in Vienna in1898 1902. For example, for Tyrol in 1890, the annual expendituresequal:

ii

Viennai

i

w

Viennai

Tyrol i

i

w

Tyrol i

Tyrol iTyrol X P

P

P

P

P E

ii21

1

,19021898

21

1 ,19021898

,1902189821

1 ,19021898

,18901890

where

ii

Viennai

i

Viennai

i

X P

X P w

21

1

,19021898

,19021898

The first term captures the changing price level across time withinthe province of Tyrol. The second square brackets capture how cheap orexpensive Tyrol was relative to Vienna in the base years 1898–1902.The bar above P indicates the prices are averaged across the five years.The last expression is the actual cost in Krone (henceforth K) of the

basket of 21 goods (here explicit quantities consumed are specified, X i)in Vienna in the base years.

To provide a more real life interpretation of the costs of living,the “Krone value” of the consumption basket is calculated for a family

of two adults and two children. Following Allen’s (2001) practice,I take a child as equivalent to one half of an adult. This is, of course, asimplifying assumption but it happens to be one that was also used bystudies in the nineteenth century, thus allowing for ready comparisonswith costs of living reported by contemporaries. In a study on theworking-class conditions in 1869, the Viennese Chamber of Commerceclaimed that miners in Lower Austria (outside Vienna) considered anincome between 800 and 1,000 K as necessary for an annual upkeep ofa family of four. 9 Families of Viennese machinery workers required

9 The Habsburg Empire had two major currency reforms during the period in question.The first one came in 1857 when the silver content of the coin was reduced by 5 percent and thegulden was switched into a decimal system (with 100 kreuzers to a gulden, instead of 60, as




0

20

40

60

80

100

1825 1830 1835 1840 1845 1850 1855 1860 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910

Full basket, MSWFull basket, this articleWithout rent,MSWWithout rent, this articleFood only, MSWFood only, this articleFood mostly, Good (1976)

FIGURE 2COMPARISON OF PRICE INDICES – VIENNA

Sources: Good (1976); MSW; and the article.

1,200 K and clockmakers asked for 1,000 to 1,080 K (Handels-und Gewerbekammer Wien 1870, pp. 4, 8, 11). In comparison withthese, my calculations put the cost of living for a four-piece family inVienna at 958 K and in the surrounding province, Lower Austria, at 877K. A contemporaneous report from the Prague Chamber of Commerceestimated the budget of a four-member family of a machinery worker as

somewhere between 900 and 1,000 K with the figure falling to as lowas 600 K in the countryside around Prague. My index putsBohemia’s cost of living in 1869 at 854 K. All in all, my calculationsare the right order of magnitude.

Figure 2 compares the new price index with MSW’s and David F.Good’s for Vienna. Good’s (1976) index only spans 1874 1913 andomits housing and clothing (but includes coal, the only nonfood itemamong the twenty goods in the consumption basket). The series arevisibly highly correlated.10 Note that leaving out housing or other goods

does not much change the overall direction of the price developments

previously). The second reform came in 1892, when the silver gulden was replaced by a goldenKrone at a ratio of 1:2. All the prices and wages reported here were converted into Krone.

10 The correlations between my indexes and those of MSW are upwards of 0.96, with Good’sindex it is 0.74 (correlation between Good’s and MSW index is 0.84).



14 Cvrcek

(although it obviously changes the total dollar-value of the consumption basket). In the post-1873 period, the three indices never differ by more

than a few percentage points. Prior to 1860, the gap is greater forseveral reasons. First, the geometric average generates lower values formy index in the early part of the period relative to MSW’s arithmeticaverage. Second, MSW use weights from the end of the period, relyingon 1910 1912 Viennese workers’ household budgets. These grantdisproportionate weight to goods that had considerably declined in

price and increased in consumption (such as textiles), making the past price levels relatively higher. My consumption basket is closer to theconsumption pattern in the middle of the nineteenth century. Finally,

there is the difference in the overall composition of the basket whereMSW include 39 goods compared to 21 in my index.

All provinces by and large shared the same trajectory even as actual price levels varied from one province to the next.11 In the early 1830sthe difference between the cheapest province and the most expensive

province amounted to about 300 K. By 1914 this difference was stillabout 300 K but the prices have more than doubled in the meantime.The general shape of the prices index across time is not very sensitive tochanges in individual consumption weights: the index is a weightedaverage of 21 items, so any one item has only limited impact on theoverall value.12 For example, it is quite possible that maritime provincesgave a greater weight in their diet to fish as opposed to other meats. But

beef (the only meat in my basket) accounts for 11 percent of the present budget, so replacing even half of beef with fish would only affect 5.5 percent of the consumption basket and the impact would be limitedto the price differential between beef and fish. So, if fish were, say, 20

percent more expensive than beef, the overall index would be higher by

about 1.2

0.055 1 percent. To give another example, Dalmatia is theonly province where wine was consistently cheaper than beer—by a

factor of two or even three, so one could reasonably expect thatDalmatian drink consumption would be heavily leaning towards wine,relative to other provinces. Still, if the Dalmatian weights on wine and

beer were 7 percent and 2 percent instead of the 2 percent and 7 percentin the current baseline basket, the overall index would decline by about3.4 4.4 percent. Of course, if several changes were made all in thedirection of a cheaper substitute, (i.e., replacing wheat bread with rye

11 Actual costs of living for individual provinces in each year are available from author uponrequest.

12 Note how similar the price indices are in Figure 2 even when different authors use different baskets of goods. This is because the prices of main food items were highly correlated andtogether they comprised a large share of any budget.




bread and oatmeal, beer with wine, sugar and tobacco with nothing, andso on), then the overall impact could add up to 15 20 percent lower cost

of living. But then we would be dealing with a substantially differentconsumption basket and the comparability across provinces (if each province had a markedly different consumption mix) would be lost.

The impact of varying the consumption basket would be furtherlimited by the ongoing convergence in prices of many relevant

products. As measured by the coefficient of variation (COV), some 41 percent of the consumption bundle consisted of goods which recordedconsiderable price convergence over the nineteenth century. The COVof wheat, for example, declined from about 0.3 in late 1820s to 0.1

before the First World War. For beef and wood, the decline was from0.4 to 0.15. Together, these goods exerted a strong influence towards a

parallel movement in price levels across provinces. It is not surprisingthat convergence was characteristic for goods that were easily tradableand also traded. The remaining 59 percent were items whose priceswere not necessarily converging but they were not diverging either.They represented nontradables, goods which could spoil, or goodscontrolled by government monopoly (housing, legumes, tobacco, and soon) The trend was therefore towards convergence in the costs of living,as evidenced by the declining COV of the costs of the full basket from0.25 in 1827 to 0.08 in 1910. Given that the overall track record of the

period is one of rising prices (albeit with some periods of deflation), theconvergence consisted mostly of low-cost areas catching up with thehigher prices of places such as Vienna, Littoral, Salzburg, and Bohemia.

NOMINAL WAGES

The same administrative chain of command that collectedand reported the commodity prices also reported wages. Let us considerin some detail the nature (and the trustworthiness) of these data. TheTafeln zur Statistik der Oesterreichischen Monarchie (TSOM),

published from 1828 to 1865, and the Statistisches Jahrbuch derOesterreichischen Monarchie (SJOM, 1862 1881) called it “GerinsterTaglohn,” the “meagrest day wage,” until 1880 when it switched tocalling it just day wage, “Taglohn.” Other sources, such as theBohemian Gubernial Decree of December 18, 1852 asked for a

range (“Day wage of a regular day laborer from—to in Conventionalcurrency”), while the Handbook of Public Administration had the localauthorities report “der mittlere Taglohn,” that is, “middle day wage”



16 Cvrcek

(presumably middle of the range) which was to be sent to provincialgovernors and then on to the Statistical Commission (Mayrhofer

1895, p. 317). Aggravating the confusion was the fact that none of the legaldocuments specified the sector or occupation to which the day wage wassupposed to pertain ( beyond the “regular day laborer”—”gewöhnlicherTaglöhner”—in the 1852 decree cited above).13 The omission of thesectoral specification may have been deliberate: the stated purpose of thewage collection was to get a pulse on the local labor market, whateverthe main local sector may have been. The day laborers had no particularskill and were not bound to any particular sector which made their wage

rates well-suited for comparisons across provinces, whatever the sectoralcomposition of the local labor force (Handels- und Gewerbe-KammerWien, 1870, p. 215).14 Such motivation was later made explicit in section7 of the 1888 law on sickness insurance which required each district toconsult representatives of local employers and employees to establishthe “usual day wage of a regular insured worker.” This was thenused to calculate the sickness compensations for forgone wages.15 Theseambiguities notwithstanding, the preeminence of agriculture in the Austro-Hungarian economy and the fact that most reports came from smalltowns with strong agricultural hinterlands suggest that the reported wageswere primarily those of agricultural laborers. As late as 1880, the only

province (excepting Lower Austria which includes Vienna) withmore than half of the population working outside agriculture wasBohemia, and even there the agricultural sector employed 47.4 percent(Sandgruber 1978, p. 222).The “regular worker” was therefore mostlikely a farm hand of some sort. Some statistics even say as much.16

13 The situation was different in the Transleithanian part of the monarchy where the statistical publications consistently label the published wage rates as wage rates of agricultural laborers.

14 In fact, the 1869 report of the Viennese Chamber of Commerce noted seasonalmigration between sectors of “tailors, shoemakers and weavers etc. who work in the fields in thesummer or take on other day labor.” Clearly, some sectoral migration was taking place even ona relatively short-term basis.

15 The law, however, applied only to industrial workers and to those workers in agriculturewho came into contact with industrial equipment (such as thrashing machines, mills, and so on).The law also allowed the authorities to specify more than one wage rate in case the local

differences were “too large.” Some local authorities availed themselves of this option, settingseparate wages for foremen and for regular workers. Women’s and youth’s wage rates weredetermined separately.

16 The Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik (1893, p. 337) includes an overview of day wages backto 1883, using data from the annual statistical publications (TSOM, SJOM), and describes these as“average wages of agricultural workers” in individual provinces. The 1892 edition of the same publication published the data for the preceding period of 1830–1881.




0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

Day wage - present data

Average income per person per day of male day laborers - Steuerwesen (1858)

Average income per person per day of female day laborers - Steuerwesen (1858)

FIGURE 3COMPARISON OF WAGE RATES IN 1856 IN GULDEN (fl) OF CONVENTIONAL

CURRENCY (C.M.)(decimalized)

Source: Tafeln zur Statistik der Steuerwesens (1858, table XXVII).

Needless to say, even as these statistics were published, there was noshortage of critics demanding wage data of better quality and higher precision. They complained, for example, that the local authorities weregiven too much leeway in calling the local wage rate (Rauchberg 1895;Handels- und Gewerbe-kammer Reichenberg 1891). By late nineteenth

century, these criticisms had led to changes in wage reporting and tosome specialized detailed wage studies (Inama-Sternegg 1893). Theseother sources provide independent data and allow us to cross-check theday wages reported in annual publications Specifically, I compare myday wages with three such independent sources: tax data from 1856,Agriculture Ministry’s data from late nineteenth century and Chamberof Commerce data from 1851, 1869, and 1888. Figure 3 is a cross-section which compares the wage rate fromTSOM for the year 1856 with income per capita per day in individual

provinces from the Tafeln zur Statistik der Steuerwesens (1858), agovernment report that evaluated a proposed tax reform. The reportdepended on tax officials to collect 1856 income data for various groupsof population (factory workers, domestics, craftsmen, and, importantly,day laborers). Compared to the reported “Geringster Taglohn” in the



18 Cvrcek

1856 edition of the annual statistical yearbook, the tax data produce avery similar cross-sectional pattern. The higher values of the wage rate

relative to the calculated average day income can be explained by localvariation in the actual days worked (which the 1858 tax study by andlarge assumed to be the same across the board).

A similar picture emerges from Tables 4 and 5 which report thewage rates in the broader skill and sectoral cross-section. They present provincial level wages from forestry and mining. The mining and forestrywage rates were collected from private and public enterprises bythe Agriculture Ministry, an administrative branch separate from thestatistical office. Two important features emerge. One is that, just like

with the tax study data, the cross-sections seem to be in broad agreement:the Austrian provinces reported high nominal wages with Bohemia,Moravia and Silesia falling somewhat below and Galicia and Bukowinaat the very low end. Dalmatia shows high nominal wages in forestry butlow ones in mining. At the same time, the comparison of wages acrossoccupations in mining shows that the wages reported in the annualyearbooks are closest to those of plain laborers in mining (after adjustingfor the duration of a shift). In forestry, they are closest to the shift rates.

Tables 6 and 7 depict more detailed differences between industrialsectors. These wages come from Chambers of Commerce reports.The chambers occasionally collected their own data, usually throughquestionnaires sent to factory owners or to craft organizations. Such wasthe case, for example, in 1869 when the Trade Ministry asked the variousChambers of Commerce to carry out a survey of industrial wages in their jurisdiction. The results of several of these studies, primarily from LowerAustria and from Bohemia are in Table 6. Here the “Taglohn ohne Kost”(day wage without meal) reported in the official statistics that underliethe present analysis are fairly close to the overall average, weighted bynumber of observations, across sectors. Perhaps the only exception inTable 6 is the 1888 average from the area serviced by the Reichenberg(Liberec) Chamber of Commerce whose report combined all workers inits calculations, without any skill or age differentiation, and thereforeintroduced an upward bias to the averages. For the area of the PragueChamber of Commerce, Table 7 provides an overview of 1869 wage rates both across sectors and across skills and gender. Again, the “Taglohn ohneKost” reported in the annual statistics for Bohemia in 1869 (shown in the

bottom line of the table) best corresponds to the wage rate of male daylaborers.




TABLE 4WORKERS IN FORESTRY AND THEIR WAGES

Period 1873 1886 1891 1890

Source TSOM-SJOM Schindler (1889) OSH OSH

Present Data Wood-Cutters Present Data Wood-Cutters

Currency Unitfl O.W. per

Dayfl O.W. perShift/Day

fl O.W. perDay

fl O.W. perDay

Lower Austria 1.06 0.97 1.21 0.55 0.80

Upper Austria 0.99 1.19 1.01 0.58 0.85

Salzburg 1.04 1.30 1.025 0.90 1.00

Styria 0.84 1.09 0.86 0.50 0.80

Carinthia 0.89 1.08 0.87 0.70 0.90

Carniola 0.85 0.59 0.82 0.60

0.90Austrian Littoral 0.85 — 0.88 0.65 1.00

Gorz and Gradisca 0.92 0.60 — —

Istria 0.99 0.95 — —

Tyrol & Vorarlberg 1.26 1.30 1.09 0.60 1.20

Bohemia 0.81 0.65 0.72 0.20 1.20

Moravia 0.65 — 0.58 0.30 0.60

Silesia 0.67 — 0.66 0.35 0.50

Galicia 0.60 0.60 0.59 0.15 0.80

Bukowina 0.63 0.80 0.587 0.35

0.70Dalmatia 1.22 1.00 1.22 0.80 1.00

Period 1905

Source OSHStatistisches Jahrbuch der K.K. Ackerbau-Ministeriums SJ III

(1905)

PresentData

SilviculturalLaborers

Woodcutters Woodcutters – Piece Rates

Summer Winter Softwood Hardwood

Currency UnitK perDay

K per Day

K perDay

K perDay

K per m3 K per m3

Lower Austria 2.37 2.00 2.40 2.00 1.1 1.3

Upper Austria 2.39 1.90 2.10 1.90 1.2 1.4Salzburg 2.43 2.50 2.80 2.60 2.7 2.0

Styria 2.15 1.80 2.30 1.90 1.9 1.4

Carinthia 2.15 2.20 2.80 2.30 2.0 1.6

Carniola 2.00 2.00 2.50 2.00 1.7 1.2

Austrian Littoral 2.47 2.10 3.00 2.50 2.8 2.2

Tyrol & Vorarlberg 2.58 2.50 3.10 2.70 2.0 2.3

Bohemia 1.81 1.50 1.80 1.40 0.9 1.0

Moravia 1.64 1.20 1.40 1.20 0.8 0.9

Silesia 1.59 1.40 1.60 1.40 0.7 0.8

Galicia 1.52 1.10 1.60 1.30 1.1 1.0Bukowina 1.66 1.60 2.00 1.50 1.2 1.0

Dalmatia 3.04 1.90 2.10 1.60 5.0 2.5



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TABLE 4 — continued Note: TSOM stands for Tafeln zur Statistik der Oesterreichischen Monarchie, SJOM standsfor Statitisches Jahrbuch der Oesterreichischen Monarchie, OSH stands for Oesterreichische

Statistisches Handbuch. The day workers in forestry were often seasonal (October to March). fl.O.W. stands for gulden of Austrian currency.

Each of these comparisons is, of course, piecemeal. None of thesealternative sources, be it the Agriculture Ministry, the tax administrationor the Chambers of Commerce, provided wage data on a regular annual

basis for each province (unlike the statistical publications). For thisreason, they could not be used as a backbone for the provincial wageseries. But in those years and those sectors where such independent

data are available, the confrontation of independent sources suggests arecord of fairly high degree of internal consistency. While the official

publications, TSOM and SJOM, provided insufficient description ofthe wage rates they were reporting, the corroboration of these data withthe other sources shows that these were consistently closest to wagerates of male day laborers. The sector of employment may differ from

province to province depending on the local economic structure—butfor day laborers who are not tied to any particular sector by their skillsthis does not make much difference.

WAGES AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE HABSBURG EMPIRE

Prices and nominal wages are the building blocks for the analysisof real wages and living standards. Figures 4A and 4B show changesin standards of living (as measured by welfare ratios) throughout therelevant period in the eastern and western parts of the empire. It isimmediately obvious the two halves of the monarchy had very differentgrowth records. The western regions enjoyed from the 1850s a slow butcontinuous growth; in contrast, the eastern and south-eastern provinceswere at best stagnant (some even saw a mild decline) in standards ofliving.

Let us consider Cisleithania first. In the late 1820s one could perhapsdiscern three blocs. One consisted of the South-Western provinces ofCarniola, Carinthia, Littoral, and Tyrol. Their welfare ratios initiallystood between 0.5 and 0.6, but starting with a recession in 1827 1830,they set on a path of slow decline which was not reversed until the

1850s. Then there were the Alpine provinces of Upper and LowerAustria, Salzburg, and Styria. Their standards of living stagnated duringthe first three decades, with welfare ratios in the 0.35 0.45 range.




TABLE 5WAGE RATES PER SHIFT IN MINING AND METALLURGY IN 1874 IN FL. O.W.

Hours perShift Miners WagonDrivers DayLaborers Women PresentData

Lower AustriaBituminous coal 10 to 11 0.90 1.00 0.80 0.90 — —

1.17Iron ore 10 or 11 1.00 1.20 0.80 0.90 — —

Upper Austria Bituminous coal 12 1.50 1.20 0.90 0.60 0.65 0.98

Salzburg Iron works 12 1.13 0.70 0.90 — 1.11

Styria

Iron ore 12 1.00 0.90 — 0.50

0.93Bituminous coal 12 1.20 1.00 — —

All sectors 12 1.02 0.83 — 0.51

Carinthia

Iron works 12 0.90 1.30 0.50 1.10 0.50 1.000.93Mining 9 0.65 0.45 0.50 — 0.40

CarniolaMining 12 0.90 0.75 0.70 —

0.88Iron works 12 0.96 1.10 0.70 0.88 0.60 0.64 —

Littoral (Istria) Brown coal 12 1.18 0.70 — — 1.02

Tirol Copper mining NA 0.78 0.60 0.42 — 1.25

Bohemia

Bituminous coal 8 0.90 1.15 0.65 0.80 0.60 0.75 0.35 0.50

0.96Brown coal 12 1.35 1.15 1.00 0.70

Iron ore 8 0.85 1.10 0.50 0.70 0.50 0.60 0.32 0.36

MoraviaBituminous coal 12 0.92 1.00 0.48 0.76 — 0.32 0.40

0.63

Brown coal 12 1.75 0.86 0.69 —Silesia Bituminous coal 8 1.10 — — — 0.70

West Galicia(Krakow area)

Brown coal NA — — 0.67 —

0.66East Galicia(Lemberg area)

Brown coal NA — — 0.50 0.67 —

Iron ore NA — — 0.66 0.80 —

Bukowina Iron works 12 0.76 — 0.65 — 0.66

Dalmatia Brown coal 12 0.70 0.80 0.55 0.60 — 0.35 1.19

Source: Der Bergwerks-Betrieb Oesterreichs (1874), Galician mining wages were not specified by occupation.

Finally, there were the northern Slavic provinces of Bohemia, Moravia,Silesia, and Galicia which were also stagnant but their welfare ratioswere a cut below the Alpine values, at 0.25 0.33. Clearly, this was a verymeager existence.17 Prior to about 1855, all of these western provinces

17 Note that the welfare ratio measures whether a family of four could be sustained on

one adult male’s income where each of the two children’s consumption requirement is assumedto equal half that of an adult. If the value is less than 1, then clearly, the basketof goods would only be affordable if the male breadwinner’s income is supplemented by, say,labor income of other family members. From the (limited) available information on women’sand children’s wages, day-laboring women earned about 70 80 percent of men’s wages andchildren stood at about 60 percent. If a day laborer earned enough for a welfare ratio of 0.33(i.e., being able to cover a third of the expenses), his wife chipped in another 0.25 ( 75 percent



22 Cvrcek

TABLE 6AVERAGE DAY WAGE RATES BY SECTOR

Location Province

Bohemia -

ReichenbergArea Vienna

Upper Austria

Bohemia -

PragueArea

Bohemia -

ReichenbergArea

Year 1851 1869 1869 1869 1888

OccupationAll

WorkersDay

LaborersDay

LaborersDay

Laborers All WorkersCurrency Unit kr C.M. fl O.W. fl O.W. fl O.W. fl O.W.

S e c t o r s

I. Machinery 42.2 1.35 1.09 0.75 1.18

II. Metallurgy 33.7 1.04 0.86 0.50 1.54III. Products from non-metallic materials(for example, glass industry)

42.7 0.85 0.78 0.61 1.18

IV. Chemical products 23.3 1.08 0.93 0.59 1.30V. Foodstuffs and other consumptionarticles (for example tobacco)

23.6 0.80 0.55 0.46 0.94

VI. Textiles 24.7 1.25 0.74 0.57 0.94VII. Products from organic materials(for example leather, paper industries)

26.2 1.10 0.82 0.59 1.01

VIII. Specialized art-related crafts(printing, typesetting)

46.1 — — 0.88 1.34

IX. Construction (skilled workers) — — — 1.16

Agriculture Summer 22.9 — — — —

Agriculture Winter 17.3 — — — —

Weighted average 24.5 1.11 0.81 0.57 1.02“Taglohn ohne kost” quoted in TSOM,SJOM (present data) 22.3 1.00 0.85 0.56 0.80

Note: “kr. C.M.” stands for kreuzers of Conventional currency (in circulation before 1857), “fl.O.W.” means gulden of Austrian currency (in circulation in 1858 1899).Source: Die Arbeits- und Lohnverhaltnisse (1870); Bericht uber die materielle Lage (1852);SOA Praha archive – OZK Praha.

experienced the same business cycle, as evidenced by the downturns of

1835 and 1847, but overall showed no progress in living standards for theday laborer. From the mid-1850s on, however, they all shared in a slow but continuous growth so that by 1910, living standards had grown by 70 percent on average and almost doubled in some areas (such as Bohemia).

of 0.33) and the two children another 0.2 each, then overall the family could afford 0.98 of the

basket for family of four. For values below that, the family would have to cut on some of theitems, such as meat, wine, and tobacco, or substitute cheaper alternatives, such as by switchingfrom wheat bread to rye bread and oatmeal and so on Allen (2001) addresses this issue byconstructing a bare-bones basket (or subsistence basket) which costs about 50 percent of hisrespectable basket. Since my basket is actually somewhat richer and bigger than Allen’s (2001)respectable basket, the room for cutting down to bare essentials would be, in percentage terms,even greater than 50 percent.




TABLE 7AVERAGE DAY WAGES REPORTED IN INDUSTRIAL SECTORS OF THE PRAGUE

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE IN 1869

(fl per day) Master

Craftsmen andSupervisors

Skilled Workers Day Laborers Youth

Men Women Men Women Boys Girls

S e c

t o r s

I. Machinery 2.40 1.38 0.75 0.30

II. Metallurgy 1.40 0.90 0.70 0.50 0.33 0.26 0.25III. Non-metallic materials

(for example, glass industry)1.31 0.88 0.46 0.61 0.32 0.20 0.22

IV. Chemical products 1.14 0.96 0.57 0.59 0.39 0.31 0.25V. Foodstuffs

and other consumptionarticles (for example, tobacco) 1.12 0.78 0.44 0.46 0.34 0.33 0.28

VI. Textiles 1.65 0.92 0.47 0.57 0.45 0.33 0.30VII. Products from organicmaterials (for example,leather, paper industries)

1.61 0.91 0.40 0.59 0.34 0.12 0.27

VIII. Specialized art-related

crafts (printing, typesetting)2.69 1.87 0.49 0.88 0.26

“Taglohn ohne kost” quoted inTSOM, SJOM (present data)

— — — 0.56 — — —

Note: Archival data; the last row is from the present sample for comparison’s sake BohemianTaglohn for 1869.

Meanwhile, the Transleithanian provinces went through periodicupswings such as in the mid-to-late 1860s and again in early 1880s butnever launched on a path of sustained growth in living standards. Notethat early in the period, their welfare ratios actually stood at relativelyhigh values, between 0.4 and 0.6.18 The eastern provinces at first offered better living standards to the day laborers than many of the lands in thewest. This was largely due to the relatively low prices of foodstuffs in the

east. By late nineteenth century, however, the eastern provinces werealmost all overtaken by the growth in the west.All this bears directly on a long-standing problem in the research

on Habsburg economic history, that of the long-term economic performance of the empire. The opinion has varied in historiography fromAlexander Gerschenkron’s (1977) relatively pessimistic assessmentof an economy, which never quite took off, to a more optimistic view byGood (1983) who argued that modern economic growth had been presentalready in the 1820s to Schulze’s (2000, p. 328) view that, at least as far

as late nineteenth-century economic growth was concerned, it was nothingspectacular, with the western provinces growing slower than the eastern

18 Dalmatia is clearly an outlier—more on that below.



24 Cvrcek

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

1825 1835 1845 1855 1865 1875 1885 1895 1905

Vienna Lower AustriaUpper Austria SalzburgStyria CarinthiaCarniola LittoralTyrol BohemiaMoravia SilesiaGalicia Bukowina

FIGURE 4A

WELFARE RATIOS CISLEITHANIA, 1827 1910

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

1825 1835 1845 1855 1865 1875 1885 1895 1905

DalmatiaHungaryWestern SlovakiaEastern SlovakiaCroatia/SlavoniaBanatTransylvania

FIGURE 4B

WELFARE RATIOS TRANSLEITHANIA AND DALMATIA

Note: Welfare ratio is a ratio of an imputed annual income of a male day laborer (assuming 250days of work per year) divided by the cost of a basket of goods needed to feed a family of twoadults and two children (each counting as half an adult).




0

0.4

0.8

1.2

1.6

2

2.4

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

1825 1835 1845 1855 1865 1875 1885 1895 1905

K per Day K per Year

Cisleithania - real GDP per capita (Kausel, 1979) - left axis

Cisleithania - real GDP per capita (Schulze, 2000) - left axis

Transleithania - real GDP per capita (Schulze, 2000) - left axis

Cisleithania - avg real wage (population-weighted) - right axis

FIGURE 5COMPARING REAL WAGES AND GDP PER CAPITA

Note: The average real wage is calculated as a population-weighted average of provincial realwages.

ones whose growth, in turn, “ranked about mid-range in the Europeangrowth comparison.” Anton Kausel (1979, table 11), on the otherhand, argued that in 1870 1913 the whole Habsburg monarchy wasgrowing faster than any other European country bar Germany, Sweden,and Denmark. Our wage data offer a new point of entry into this importantquestion.

Figure 5 juxtaposes Schulze’s and Kausel’s estimates against my population-weighted average real wage in Cisleithania and Transleithania.There is no strong a priori theoretical reason why GDP per capita shouldalways correlate with the wages of day laborers. Indeed, day laborers earnfew returns from skills, and none from capital or land. Their wages willreflect the evolution of aggregate income only if payment shares to factors(land, labor, and capital) are constant and the wage distribution is stable. Nevertheless, if economic growth is driven by productivity-enhancing

technological change, it can be expected to increase the marginal product(and hence the price) of labor and to trickle down to improve the livingstandards of the population at large. The comparison between real wagesand the real GDP per capita shows that they were highly correlatedfor the Cisleithanian provinces from 1870 onward but not for the



26 Cvrcek

Transleithanian ones. Prior to 1870 Kausel’s (1979) scattered GDPestimates in 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860 suggest a divergence between

wages and GDP per capita even in the West, with an upward trend inincome per capita unfolding alongside stagnant real wages.While it is beyond the scope of this work to do more than speculate on

the causes of the diverging records of real wage growth and GDP growth,a natural step would be to look at distributional issues. In the west, itseems that the economic growth eventually did trickle down all the wayto common laborers and all social strata saw their fortunes improve.The eastern situation was somewhat different. Economic historians, fromOszkar Jaszi (1929) through Ivan Berend and György Ranki (1974) to

Good (1983), report that the second half of the nineteenth century was atime of increased concentration of land ownership in Hungary, to the point that a bimodal distribution emerged with large-scale aristocraticestates at the top and small subsistence-size plots at the bottom (Brusattiet al. 1973, p. 490). Such a shift could reconcile the Transleithanianreal wage and GDP records if consolidation of land ownership amongaristocrats led to economies of scale and productivity growth through theintroduction of new machinery as a substitute for farm labor. In this case,output could have grown while agricultural wages fell.

At any rate, there was a small-scale “reversal of fortunes” taking place within the Habsburg Empire during the nineteenth century. Those provinces, such as Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia Galicia, and Bukowina,which had started from very modest beginnings, pulled themselvesup considerably by 1910, overtaking the bucolic farming regions ofHungary, Banat, and Transylvania. Part of the reversal was likely due tothe ongoing industrialization in the west, especially in the Czech lands.Already in 1841, Bohemia was home to 59 percent of all of the empire’scotton weaving and 73 percent of calico printing, while Moraviacontained 53 percent of all woolen textiles (Good 1984). Bohemia andSilesia were also rich in coal and close to German markets. Prior to,say, 1850, these fledgling industrial sectors were still relatively youngand small to make much difference but their importance grew and with italso their impact on the labor market, including the agricultural labormarket (through migration and urbanization). Still, the industry cannot bethe whole story because rising real wage was also observed in Galicia andBukowina, provinces as agricultural as any in the east.

The East-West dichotomy produced also different records in termsof convergence ( -convergence, more specifically) of living standards.The empire saw no convergence in living standards after 1850 asa whole. Cisleithania, however, clearly saw a decline in thecoefficient of variation among its provinces especially after 1880. In




Transleithania, however, the initial disparities between provinces persisted throughout the period. The contrast confirms that the Dual

Monarchy had been dual economically long before it became soofficially (in 1867).This brings us to another issue in Habsburg economic history and

another candidate explanation for the east-west split: institutionaldivergence. Scholars have argued that the 1848 revolution and thedivergent institutional reforms that followed set the two regions ondifferent paths. Note that the growth record in the two parts was not thatdifferent in the first half of the nineteenth century. Prior to the work ofJohn Komlos (1983), the prevailing view was that the year 1848 was a

watershed: it led to the final abolition of corveé (or robota in local parlance) throughout the empire and it ushered in a set of reformsover the next decade. These included abolition of all internal tariffs(1850), privatization of railroads (1854), currency reform (1857), newCommercial Code (1859), and redrawing of the empire’s administrativedivisions (1852 1856). Komlos (1983) argued forcefully that the 1848fallout was overrated because he found no break in the trends of theavailable output series around 1848. The real wage series in Figures 4A

and 4B bring new evidence to the question: as mentioned before, whilewe do not see a clear break in trend in 1849, there clearly emerges anupward trend in the west by 1860 at the latest.

Could the post-1848 reforms have been the cause of the onset ofgrowth from mid-1850s on? Clearly, we would not expect an immediatechange in aggregate output. The initial 1848 law that did away with thecorvee and the last vestiges of feudal land ownership was not properlyimplemented until 1853. If there were productivity gains to be reapedfrom such a change, one would expect that they would not materialize in1849 but rather after 1853. As it happens, the western provinces, wherewage growth most clearly begins after 1853, are also those whereserfdom had been most entrenched: Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, andGalicia. In the Transleithanian provinces, the absence of any response inlevel or growth rate of real wages likely stems from the fact that somereforms had already been enacted by the Hungarian diet some time beforeas part of the Reform era (1825–1848), so the empire-wide abolition probably had only a limited impact.

The institutional aspect of land ownership and agricultural labor

market may affect wages in more subtle ways as is amply illustrated by the odd outlier in Figure 4B, Dalmatia. By any benchmark, Dalmatiawas a poor, underdeveloped province. The first steam engine only arrived



28 Cvrcek

there in 1863.19 The census of 1890 found only 3.4 percent of itsworkforce employed in industry. Labor productivity was considered low

(Petter 1857). Literacy among population above 6 years of age stoodat 23.1 percent for men and 9.3 percent for women (compared to theCisleithanian values of 68.5 percent and 62.6 percent). Given all this,contemporary opinion explained the high Dalmatian wage rates as aresult of underdeveloped, fractured labor market. Heinrich Rauchberg(1895, p. 128) argued, for example, that the reported nominal wages weremisleading in Dalmatia and Istria, two areas of low development, becausemost of the local population were paid in kind and the dataon market wages were generated in the tiny sliver of the labor market

that was monetized and that pertained to specialized and/or seasonalworkers. Carl Theodor Inama-Sternegg (1895) showed that daylaborers in Dalmatia and Istria made up generally less than 1 percentof agricultural labor market.20 Most of the agricultural labor forcearound the Adriatic consisted of either smallholders or sharecroppers(“mezzadros” in local parlance). This suggests a fairly static, immobileagricultural labor force and a correspondingly shallow labor market. Onemay have then observed next to no day wage quotations for most of theyear as all labor was tied in long-term contracts or sharecroppingarrangements and then a sudden flurry of high wage rates during short,labor-intensive periods, such as during harvests, as local labor demandran into highly constrained local labor supply. Such features would alsoexplain the frequent remarks about the local shortage of labor (Schmidle1842; Petter 1857; Rauchberg 1895). It is possible that, early on in the period, similar institutional featuresinhibited labor market mobility in some of the eastern provinces, forexample, Croatia, Hungary, Banat, or Transylvania, producing relativelyhigh wages for agricultural laborers there. Then gradually, as theeconomy monetized, as institutional obstacles to mobility weakened andas the pressure of consolidation of land ownership mentioned earlierturned some farmers into day laborers, the agricultural market grewever deeper and also more abundant in the supply of agricultural laborers.An explanation of this kind would actually imply that the stagnant realwages of eastern day laborers may in fact hide a much bigger decline forat least some of the peasants who saw their situation deteriorate as theunfolding economic forces pushed them down the social ladder from

smallholders to day laborers.

19 The following statistics come from OSH (1891, pp. 9, 68); Darstellung (1829, Tafel 83);OSH (1893, p. 16); MGS 11:2 (1864, p. 44)

20 This share was five to twenty times smaller than in any other province: Bohemia, Moravia,and Silesia have values ranging from 14 percent to 22 percent.




0.00

0.20

0.40

0.60

0.80

1.00

1.20

1.40

1.60

1825 1835 1845 1855 1865 1875 1885 1895 1905

Vienna

Tyrol

Bohemia

Galicia

Transylvania

London-Construction workers (Allen)

England-Farm workers (Clark)

FIGURE 6WELFARE RATIOS FULL BASKET

Sources: See Clark (2001), Allen (2001), and Clark (2010) for English wages.

A final important issue is whether the Habsburg Empire was catchingup or falling behind the rest of Europe during its last decades of existence.Figure 6 offers a comparison of real wages in a selection of Habsburg provinces with England.21 The graph depicts the ratio between a worker’sestimated annual earnings and the cost of a full basket of goods(as defined in Tables 1–3) in the Habsburg Empire and in England.22

Prices come from Clark (2010). Two wage series from England areused: Clark’s (2001) for farm workers and Allen’s (2001) for constructionlaborers in London. Annual earnings are estimated as day wage multiplied by 250 work days per year.23 The total cost of living is estimated,following Allen (2001), as the sum total (in local currency) that would benecessary to feed a family of two adults and two children (see note underFigures 4A and 4B).

21 The Habsburg provinces are selected so that they represent both the high and the low end

of real wage estimates.22 This means that the welfare ratios for the English workers are calculated using the CentralEuropean consumption basket. In doing that, I do not imply that this is what English workerswould have consumed; it is done merely to ensure comparability.

23 Most sources claim or imply that there were 300 work days in a given year (for example,Steuerwesen (1858)), so the chosen value of 250 allows for work day losses due to disease,unemployment, and various holidays.



30 Cvrcek

Not surprisingly, the English farm workers were, by and large, better off than those in the Habsburg Empire for most of the period. The

exceptions are the 1830s and 1840s when relatively high costs of living produced low welfare ratios for the English farm workers. But even thenthe English countryside offered real wages comparable to those paid inVienna and not too far from those paid in Tyrol. After 1850 only thehighest-paying Habsburg provinces could keep pace with the situation inEngland and from the late 1870s, only Viennese workers were getting a better deal than English farm workers. Provinces such as Bohemia andGalicia fall consistently behind England by about 50 percent and this gap,if anything, widens with time.

The urban labor market of Vienna should, however, more appropriately be compared with the urban construction wages in London.The welfare ratios, computed from Allen’s (2001) construction laborers’wages, are consistently higher than in any Habsburg province and by aconsiderable margin which is a result to be expected: Britain was theleading economic power through most of the nineteenth century while theHabsburg Empire was decidedly a laggard. The graph shows that the gap between London and Vienna was quite sizeable: in 1845 Viennese wagerates were less than half of what London was paying and even as late as1895, the gap was still 100 percent. Expressed another way, the Vienneseworkers were always at least 40 years behind their London counterparts interms of their real wage.

Overall, the real wage series produce four main findings. First, livingstandards in the Habsburg Empire did not begin to rise until the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. Second, growth in wages led to onlylimited convergence in living standards and may have in fact increasedthe gap between the two halves of the Dual Monarchy. Third, wagegrowth was insufficient to close the gap with the economic leader ofthe times, Great Britain. Fourth, the farther east one goes, the trickier theinterpretation of real wages is because of the potentially complex issuesof labor market institutions. The last point is most amply illustrated bythe Dalmatian case but is not limited to it.

CONCLUSIONS

The economic development of the Habsburg Empire has been a subject

of intense debate ever since its demise. Oszkar Jaszi (1929) arguedthat the economy had the potential to be a strong integrating force.Conversely Alan J. P. Taylor (1948) saw the union of all these landsand kingdoms under one scepter as an historical accident without any




common economic interests. Good (1984) was quite optimistic about therealm’s economic record, speaking of its “economic rise,” while Schulze

(2000) is much more skeptical.The present series of prices and wages are an important addition tothe existing data on the nineteenth-century economic development inthis corner of Europe. They reveal a record of stagnation in the firsthalf of the nineteenth century, followed by a more consistent growthin living standards in the second half. The evidence suggests, however,that the growth was uneven and mostly limited to the western,Cisleithanian provinces. In fact, some parts of the monarchy, especiallyin the South-East, saw their living standards decline in absolute terms

over the course of the period. It is tempting to speculate that thiseconomic development in the Balkans contributed to the intractableethnic strife which dogged the Habsburg Empire in its last years andwhich eventually served as the powder keg for the First World War.Apart from failing to produce convergence internally, the growth recordalso suggests little convergence onto the rising West European livingstandard, in particular that in Great Britain. It confirms the long-standingdepiction of the Danubian Monarchy as a relatively backward state that,unlike Germany, could not close the gap.

One of the important avenues for future research will be lookinginto the institutional underpinnings of local labor markets and supplantingthe simple day laborer wage with more information about the extentof income inequality in various provinces. The institutional aspect will be particularly important in explaining not only the stagnation inTransleithania but also in addressing some of the conspicuous surprises inthe record. Perhaps the most intriguing ones are the relatively low realwages of the early industrializers, like Bohemia and Moravia, and therather high real wages observed—at least at the beginning of the period— in many Southern provinces, like Dalmatia and Croatia. It remains to beseen whether future research will corroborate or correct these findings.

Appendix 1: Geography and Sources and Their Abbreviations

Spatial Definitions: “Western” and “Cisleithanian” denote provinces ruled from

Vienna after 1867; similarly, “eastern” and “Transleithanian” denote all regions andterritories ruled from Budapest.

Spatial Consistency: Provincial borders did change somewhat overtime. In 1849Salzburg province was carved out of Upper Austria. Moravia separated from Silesia,Carinthia split from Carniola, and Galicia from Bukowina. Until then, official



32 Cvrcek

statistics quote only one average provincial price (for each good) in each mergedentity. To solve this problem, I assume that the prices reported reflect the price in thelarger of the two entities. Namely, given that Upper Austria was five times larger thanSalzburg in terms of population, I take the price quote to reflect, by and large,the Upper Austrian price levels. After 1849 Salzburg province had its own statisticsand the prices turn out to be about 10 to 20 percent higher than in Upper Austria.I therefore estimate the pre-1849 Salzburg prices by marking up the pre-1849Upper Austrian prices by whatever was the price differential for each good in1849 1854. Vorarlberg, a tiny province at the far-western end of the monarchy, isalways subsumed under Tyrol in the statistics, so no separate price or wage series areavailable for this province. Fortunately, even though the layout of statistical reportingchanged through time, the borders of individual component provinces did notchange and so the various provincial names consistently refer to the same territories

throughout the period.In the East, the situation was geographically more complicated but statisticallysimple. To begin with, the three basic units were the Kingdom of Hungary,Transylvania (Siebenbürgen, Erdély), and Croatia-Slavonia. In 1849 the Habsburgsalso created a new province, Serbian Voivodina and Temeser Banat (or Banatfor short), in the south of Hungary (around the city of Timisoara in modern-dayRomania). Soon after the Hungarians gained autonomy in 1867, they abolished the province again (as they did with Transylvania) but since their published statistics provide ample geographic detail for most of the period, it is still possible toreconstruct local prices in what used to be Banat and Transylvania. At the same time,the southern border of the monarchy was guarded by a long, centerless, amorphous

strip of land called the Military frontier ( Militärgrenze), an anachronistic outgrowthof Austro-Turkish Wars of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was ruleddirectly from Vienna and which was demilitarized and incorporated into Croatia andBanat in the 1870s and early the 1880s. This clearly constitutes a change in provincial borders. The disadvantage is that the definition of Croatia and Banat changed throughtime but on the plus side, the tight grip of Vienna on the Military frontier ensured thata full slate of statistics from this area was regularly published even in times when theTransleithanian price record grew thin due to revolution, war, or civil disobedienceon the part of the Hungarians (as it did in late 1840s and throughout the 1860s).I therefore use the Military frontier prices to interpolate Croatian and Banat prices in

times when those are missing.Moreover, modern-day Slovakia never constituted a separate province within theKingdom of Hungary (even though the current Slovak-Hungarian borders do largelyfollow the sometime borders of smaller administrative units, the Comitats/Varmegye)and so no province-level prices appear in any of the statistics for the regions I callEastern Slovakia and Western Slovakia. Overall, the region I denote Eastern Slovakiaincludes Comitats Abauj-Torna, Gömör-Kishont, Szépes, Saros, Zemplén, and theCity of Kosice/Kassa. Western Slovakia includes Comitats Pozsóny, Nyitra, Trencsén,Arva, Turocz, Liptó, Zolyom, Nograd, Hont and Bars. For those areas, the data consistof prices quoted for “Hungary” prior to 1874 and of prices primarily in Nitra (Neutra, Nyitra) and Banska Bystrica (Neusohl, Beszterczebánya) (with a little help from prices

from Bratislava-Pressburg-Pozsóny) in the Western Slovakia and in Košice (Kaschau,Kassa) in Eastern Slovakia after 1874.




Official Statistical Publications: Regular annual statistical series were published inVienna starting in 1828 and in Budapest after 1874. Most of the prices were reportedconsistently through time, although some changes in format did take place.Occasionally, some prices, such as those of legumes, rice, beverages, and wood weremissing and had to be interpolated from neighboring provinces and years. New items, such as flour, butter, sugar, petroleum, and others appeared only after1900. There are also a few cases when the publications changed the definition of thereported prices. For example, in the Cisleithanian publications, from 1881 onward the prices are reported as pertaining to provincial capitals as opposed to the provincesgenerally. Similarly, the statistics published in Budapest switched from reportingthe prices in each county to just reporting prices in the eleven most important cities(later extended to nineteen cities). Wherever these changes so required, the consistent,continuous price series for each province were reconstructed through interpolation and

splicing (see the online Appendix 2).Prices were reported as annual averages of prevailing market prices. The data werecollected by local authorities who were also entrusted with operating the tradinglocations in the various towns. This practice had already become well-established byearly nineteenth century, so that the occasionally published statistical retrospectives(such as those that appeared in connection with the proposed tax reforms in 1858and 1859) could, for example, carry standardized and continuous provincial pricesfor cereals going back to the 1770s. Price collection was also subject to continuouslegislative attention.24 An important role was played by the developing centralstatistical service (in existence since 1829 but formally established into a separategovernment agency in 1863) which pushed for standardization, regularity, and

reliability of the collected statistics. Since the local authorities were the original sourceof the price data, the province-level values for individual goods were averages ofthese local values which numbered in the tens or even hundreds.25 For the four maincereals, quantities sold at each price were also collected and the regulations instructedthe responsible officials to calculate quantity-weighted average prices.26 For othergoods, only prices (not quantities) were recorded, implying that the provincial datawere simple, unweighted averages. Such was also the case with nominal day wage.27

24 Just during the period covered here, various laws and regulations regarding price collectionwere published in 1822, 1828, 1849, 1867, 1869, and 1888 on central as well as provincial level

(Astl 1858; Mayrhofer 1895).25 For example, the administrative division enacted in 1853/54 created 209 districts (Bezirke)in the province of Bohemia and 179 in Galicia, while Vorarlberg had only 6 (it was the smallest province of 990 sq. miles and around 100,000 inhabitants).

26 See, for example, the Hofkainzleidekret of 11th February 1822, Pol G 13/1822.27 See section 7 and the Appendix for a further elaboration of the nature and definition of the

reported wage.



34 Cvrcek

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CVRCEK. Wages, Prices and Living Standards in the Habsburg Empire, 1827-1910

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