The study of heights provides a promising approach to a better understanding of the biological welfare of countries and regions for which conventional economic data are relatively sparse. This paper is based on a dataset previously unexploited: the individual records of nearly 10,000 Indonesian men conscripted into the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) used together with individual data on another 10,000 Indonesians, recorded as part of the Indonesian Family Life Surveys (IFLS). These two sets of records provide the height and place of birth of members of birth cohorts spanning nearly the entire 20th century.

Our aim in this paper is to trace the development of average height in Indonesia over the course of the twentieth century. Whereas both average height and average income increased during the second half of the century, we find that this was only after they had diverged in the first half: a divergence similar to the one (frequently discussed in the literature) that had occurred in several other countries toward the end of the 19th century. Using a newly developed “height accounting” method, we estimate that in Indonesia increasing income inequality accounts for about half of this divergence, which gradually disappeared after the Second World War, as income inequality decreased and average height increased until it was rising in tandem with average income.