Price Level and GDP in pre-War East Asia: a 1934-36 Benchmark Consumption

China, Korea and Taiwan by matching prices of more than 50 types of goods and services with consumption weights derived from household expenditure surveys. We find that the 1934-6 average consumer prices of China, Korea and Taiwan were 0.75, 0.86 and 0.84 times that of Japan respectively. Using our new benchmark PPP estimate, we reexamine the per capita income levels of these four economies in relation to previous studies which were either based on exchange rate conversion or the 1990 backward projected method. In this comparative perspective, our consumption PPP studies gives a higher per-capita income level for China in the 1930s, thus lending some tentative support to a more optimistic assessment of the early 20th century Chinese economy as well as a possibly higher initial condition for China’s Communist era