The Making of China and India in the 21st Century: Long-Run Human Capital Accumulation from 1900 to 2020

Li Yang (杨利) is an Advanced Researcher at ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. He is also a research fellow of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics. Previously, he was a researcher in the World Bank DEC research group in Washington D.C. from 2013 to 2017, a Marie Curie research fellow at Paris School of Economics from 2018 to 2020. He was also the coordinator for East and South Asia at the World Inequality Lab from 2018 to 2021.
His main research interests pertain to income and wealth inequality, economic history and political economy. His research output has been published in leading scientific journals in both economics and sociology such as American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Public Economics, World Development, the World Bank Economic Review, European Journal of Political Economy and the British Journal of Sociology. Owing to their relevance for ongoing public debates, his findings have also widely been discussed in diverse media outlets, such as the Economist, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, etc.
Li Yang received his PhD in Economics in 2019 from Xiamen University, China.

This paper investigates the divergence in economic growth between China and India from the 1980s through the lens of human capital accumulation. We construct a novel dataset spanning 120 years, drawing on a wide range of historical educational reports and surveys. The data reveal distinct strategic choices in education expansion across the two countries, including differences in the timing of mass primary schooling, the diversification of secondary and post-secondary tracks, and the management of quantity–quality trade-offs. Using nationally representative household surveys from both countries, we show that these divergent educational strategies led to significant differences in aggregate human capital stocks, which, in turn, shaped patterns of wage inequality and the trajectory of economic transition following trade and market liberalization in the 1980s.