Fruits of the Boom: Urban Rents, Cash Crop Growth, and Wages in Dakar, 1914–1960

Abstract

This paper offers a new real wage series for colonial Dakar, French Senegal, from 1914 to 1960, incorporating housing costs for unskilled laborers. Housing costs were sometimes an important share of household budgets and traditional methods of accounting for them in the “welfare ratio” literature will overstate income gains in economic booms. Gains for urban workers during Dakar’s growth were muted by higher housing costs, particularly in the 1920s and 1950s. Cross-sectional evidence for the late colonial period displays considerable heterogeneity, suggesting that housing costs were a substantial burden for unskilled workers, though not always and not in all locations.