This growing apart of Poland and the North Sea region happens especially in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Our findings confirm the impressions provided by previous comparative studies of preindustrial Poland that the country lagged behind compared with England and The Netherlands (Allen 2001 Van Zanden 2001 WГіjtowicz and WГіjtowicz 2009 Baten and SzoЕ‚tysek 2014). We compare the results internationally between 14. We reconstruct a social table for one of the economic and political centres of Poland, the Voivodeship of Cracow, and on this basis also explore the level of per capita GDP of Poland in this period (we discuss the representativeness of the region for Poland as a whole later in the text). This article seeks to establish how the Polish historical experience relates to the debates on income inequalities within and between countries in the early modern period. Poland recovered slightly in the eighteenth century but continued to lag behind Western Europe. In the seventeenth century, Poland impoverished and became even poorer than Asian economies for which similar estimates are available. This gap persisted despite moderate growth of the Polish economy in the sixteenth century. Our results indicate that Polish per capita GDP was below that of Western Europe as early as the fifteenth century. Using trends in real wages and urbanisation, we also project Polish GDP forwards and backwards in time. This can be explained by the demesne economy based on serfdom that was prevalent in agriculture. Furthermore, income inequality in the countryside of the Voivodeship was higher than inequality in Cracow. However, the extraction rate was much higher than in the North Sea area. Our evidence indicates that income in Poland was distributed more equally than in contemporary Holland. It is based on a social table for the Voivodeship of Cracow in 1578. This article presents per capita GDP and income distribution estimates for preindustrial Poland.

Average salary poland ppp