GNP and Real Wages

Danish figures for GNP have only been calculated back to 1818 and are relatively rough estimates for the earliest years and therefore not suitable for analysis.

Sources for calculation of real wage indices are, on the other hand, available, but the use of such indices in analyses gives rise to at least two important questions.

Wage earners were, until the second half of the nineteenth century, a small proportion of the total Danish population and the monetary economy was, on the whole, little developed until the late eighteenth century. Between 1700 and 1850 nearly 80% of the population were living in rural districts, mainly from agriculture. For most of the eighteenth century those living from the land they tilled were mainly tenants, from whom the estate owners were responsible for collecting taxes. Most of these payments and other transactions between the tenants and the estate owners and the public authorities took place in kind, and as well most of the servants and

day-labourers working on farms and estates were given food and accommodation where they worked and were paid little, if any, of their incomes in money wages. This situation changed during the period of agricultural reforms, as many of the farmers became freeholders and started selling their surplus products on the open

Table 12.1 Occupational distribution of the Danish population in 1801

‘ The division line between a farmer and a cottager with land was one barrel of ‘Hartford’, a measure of land value and therefore different in size from the most fertile to the poorer soils. On average land the cottager would have up to c.10 acres and at least the cottagers with the smallest fields would have to supplement their income by day-labour work.

Note: (+) indicates that the group may have got part of their income in money, but most of it in kind.

market, and an increasing number of day-labourers came to receive most of their incomes from money wages.

In the towns, a majority of the population consisted of artisans and traders and the people employed by them. The latter group lived to a large extent in the houses of their masters, which means that among journeymen and urban day- labourers, few—mainly in Copenhagen—had a household of their own and received money wages.

The result of this is demonstrated in a schematic form in Table 12.1 with figures based on the 1801 census. Less than 10% of the population were living solely from money incomes and among those most were salaried civil servants, who were covered in a less satisfactory way by a real wage index based on workers' wages. Among the groups which may have received a certain part of their income in money, the largest one is that of the servants, who no doubt were still paid mostly in kind while living with their employers. The second largest group were cottagers without land, comprising old people, some day-labourers, single women, and others. Some of them were probably day-labourers who, to an increasing extent, received money wages but there were also some who were former farmers receiving food and other necessities from the new tenant or owner who had taken over their tenancy or bought their farm.

The conclusion of the survey in Table 12.1 is, therefore, that before the agricultural reforms and even to some extent in the first decades after the reforms had been introduced, a real wage index based on wages paid to unskilled workers only indicates the level of the standard of living for a minority of the population.

For the rest of the population, there is no guarantee that the fluctuations in a real wage index reflected the same effect on their standards of living. Some may have been almost unaffected by wage and price changes because of the subsistence economy they were living in and others may have benefited in some cases from a decline in the index and suffered from a rise, as the following sections will indicate.

3.