Demographic Response to Short-term Economic Stress
The final part of the book is devoted to demographic responses to short-term economic stress as an indicator of the standard of living. The most extreme case is when a rise in food prices raises mortality.
The loss of life is itself an indicator of low living standards. In addition, the fact that rising price could cause death indicates that ‘normal’ food intake was precariously low. In less extreme situations, high food prices could lead to deferred marriage and family formation. The demographic response to food prices can be measured with longitudinal data for individuals including social status, access to land and other household characteristics as well as demographic events.Marco Breschi, Alessio Fornasin, and Giovanna Gonano measure the mortality response to fluctuations in wheat prices in Tuscany during the period 1823—59. Their results show a positive correlation between mortality and price for all age groups except infants. This finding is in accordance with evidence from many other parts of Europe as well (Bengtsson and Reher 1998). These results indicate that a significant proportion of Tuscan society lived so close to the margin that their health and survival were affected by poor harvests. There were suggestive differences between different parts of Tuscany. It was, paradoxically, the wealthiest rural regions that showed the strongest mortality response to food price rises. In these areas, most work was done by wage labourers whose consumption was vulnerable to changes in the price of wheat. In contrast, sharecropping predominated in poorer regions, and sharecroppers had some protection against rising food prices since they raised food.
Tommy Bengtsson and Martin Dribe use data on individuals to study the impact of food price fluctuations on the fertility and mortality of landless people in the province of Scania in southern Sweden.
Real wages and life expectancy both indicate that the standard of living of landless labourers did not start to rise until the second half of the nineteenth century. This result is corroborated by the demographic investigation. Landowning peasants took advantage of the new opportunities created by the transformation of agriculture in the first half of the nineteenth century to increase their incomes (Schon 1979). In contrast, the agricultural transformation and enclosure movement implied increased dependencyon wage labour for the landless. The agricultural revolution also destroyed the village institutions that had previously provided income security to the poor. As a result of these changes, fluctuations in food prices had a greater impact on the mortality and fertility of landless labourers during the agricultural revolution than the years before or after.
Michel Oris, George Alter, and Muriel Neven undertook a longitudinal analysis of two rural areas in nineteenthcentury Belgium—the Land of Herve and the East Ardennes. Both were poor and overpopulated, but they were also both adjacent to regions that were undergoing rapid economic development. One response in both regions was migration to the industrializing cities. Despite this opportunity, however, both regions showed evidence of endemic poverty: mortality and fertility in both communities were highly responsive to economic stress throughout the nineteenth century. Vulnerability remained high for women throughout the same period, indicating a relatively low standard of living well after the beginning of industrialization. In the East Ardennes, the poorest region, men were also vulnerable to economic stress during the first half of the nineteenth century, but this vulnerability diminished in the second half.
Cameron Campbell and James Lee compared the demographic responses to food price jumps in different regions of Liaoning in northeast China during the period 1749—1909 using micro level population registers.
This province differs from the regions studied by Pomeranz and Li Bozhong in their contributions to this volume in terms of economic structure, population density, etc. In the northern and southern parts of Liaoning both the mortality and fertility response to changes in rice prices disappeared between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indicating a rise in the standard of living and a level above that of some parts of Europe. In the central part of the province, however, conditions failed to improve, and the authors link the poor rural conditions to those in Shenyang. It was the leading city and experienced increasing economic difficulties in the nineteenth century. People in the adjacent countryside were also affected by this decline and tried to adjust both childbearing and marriage to the deteriorating economic conditions. In some districts, mortality remained sensitive to economic fluctuations throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, in the Shenyang region, rural living conditions remained poor, as they did in central China in Pomeranz's account. However, there was improvement in outlying country districts. The different trajectories highlight the need for regional analyses of the long-term economic and demographic development before drawing definitive conclusions about China as a whole.According to Noriko Tsuya and Satomi Kurosu, Tokugawa Japan (1716—1870) differed in important ways from northeastern China. In Japan, marriage and migration were the demographic variables most sensitive to economic fluctuations. The economy had scarcely any effect on fertility, and the mortality response depended on age as well as sex. As for nuptiality, marriages in which the bride moved into the household of her husband were the most sensitive to economic fluctuations and responded with a lag of between two and four years: Japanese families were reluctant to take on additional household members following difficult
economic times. Legally sanctioned migration declined when the economy was poor since there were few job openings, but unsanctioned migration increased as people desperately sought work. Women had low status in Japanese society, and the death rate among young girls rose when economic conditions were poor. More surprisingly, mortality also rose among elderly men in the same circumstances. The mortality patterns do parallel those found by Lee, Campbell and Tan (1992) for Liaoning, China, in the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century.
6.