Net Income Per Capita in Rural Wuxi, 1840s-1940s

Net income per capita in rural Wuxi did not change linearly from the 1840s to the 1940s. It tripled from the 1860s-80s and then retreated to approximately the level of the 1840s by the 1930s-40s. The sharp fluctuation was caused mainly by changes in population and household economic structure, as agricultural yields changed little. Development of the industrial and urban economy partially offset declining income in sericulture in the 1920s-40s by employing rural laborers, but raising the net income per capita to the late-nineteenth-century level would have required the threefold growth of the Jiangnan industrial and urban economy, which was unlikely.