Renewed research effort has been taken to make a rigorous comparison, based on a novel concept of "welfare rati", between Asian and European real wages in early modern times. This paper, an overview of the issues and empirical results the on-going research has so far produced, shows that real wages in historic China, Japan and southern Europe were at about the same level, but remained distinctly lower than in England and the Netherlands for much of the period reviewed. However, the comparison becomes more complicated if factors such as agricultural income, by-employment, working days, and possible changes in the diet mix are taken into account. By examining the case of Tokugawa Japan's peasantry, it is suggested that their standard of living may have been much closer to the standard achieved by early modern north-west European wage-earning populations.
