involved project member(s)

Bas van Leeuwen	Peter Foldvari

abstract

Despite a consensus about the main factors influencing economic mobility in Indonesia, such as labor-market opportunities and childhood circumstances, virtually nothing is known about how these factors increased economic standing in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The use of height data as a proxy for people’s economic situation, however, finds that whereas ethnicity was a strong predictor of economic status before Indonesia’s Independence, education assumed that role after 1946.

keywords

Indonesia, Netherlands Indies, economy, inequality, poverty, economic mobility

link to paper page of the journal website

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/JINH_a_00976

citation format