Mortality Response to Economic Stress

From our previous discussion of what we know about the development of standard of living using traditional measures, we would assume that the mortality response to economic fluctuations among the landless was much the same until after about 1850, when we expect it to become weaker.

sustaining arrangements and relationships, both financial and personal.’⁴ We also expect the change in mortality response to economic stress in the second half of the nineteenth century to be much the same for males and females, since opportunities to work outside the home increased for both sexes.

The reason why we do not expect the response to short-term economic stress to decline during the transformation of the agricultural sector in the beginning of the nineteenth century is that this development seems to have favoured the landed groups rather than the landless, as was previously discussed. Contemporary evidence also indicates that the landless had problems finding jobs in bad harvest years in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the poor relief system was reorganized by the end of this period, indicating previous incapability to take care of the poor (Skoglund ’992; Banggaard 2002).

With regard to the social welfare system, we expect the conditions in all four parishes to be much the same, since such a small percentage of the population was taken care of by the poor law system.

Table ’4.2 shows the Cox regression estimates for mortality among adults in working ages, 25—55 years. The reason why we start at age 25 and not ’5 is that we have a lot of migration among young servants (e.g Dribe and Lundh 2002), for which we have no data before ’829. In model ’ the covariates are parish, sex, birth year, and rye prices. In model 2 we also estimate the effects of short-term economic stress on females and males individually, by including an interaction term. All estimations are made for all three periods: ’766—18’5, ’8’5—65, and ’865—95. The number of events is between ’29 and 323, with the lowest number for the last period. Somewhat surprisingly we only find a strong mortality response during the second period, while we are unable to detect any evidence for a mortality response among the landless in the working age group during the pre-transformation phase (’766—’8’5) and the industrialization phase (’865—95). The response during the transformation phase is quite strong; a ’0% increase in food prices is followed by a ’0% increase in mortality within a year (’2% for males and 8% for females). There are no statistically significant differences between adult males and females in any of the periods, which indicate a rather unifor m response between the sexes.

The mortality differentials between the parishes change over time. It is highest in Sirekopinge in the first period, Halmstad in the second period, and Kavlinge in the third period. We also estimated a model in which the effect of living in a freeholder/crown tenant parish or a noble tenant parish on the vulnerability of short-term economic stress on landless was accounted for by including an interaction term, without finding any consistent pattern (not presented here).

Table 14.2 Effects of food prices on mortality in ages 25—55 for landless and semi-landless in the four parishes, 1766-1895

p2000; Bengtsson and Dribe 2000). From previous research on cause-specific mortality, we know that excess mortality in both the adults and the children resulted from infectious diseases, airborne and waterborne, though not always from the same disease (Bengtsson 2000). Thus, we find no evidence that a single disease was spread in bad years but rather that they died of any common disease due to low resistance, which implies that they were malnourished. Mortality typically increased in the spring after a fall with increasing food prices. The rapid response implies that their resistance was low. Another indication of low resistance is that not just very high prices but also moderately high prices affected mortality, while mortality did not decline much in years of low prices (Bengtsson 2000). Evidently, many among the landless lived close to the margin.

Perhaps the most important finding is that the price effects on mortality among children and adults belonging to the landless group are stronger in the middle period than either before or after. We certainly expected the effects to disappear or at least be weaker in the last period, since we believe that the standard of living increased. But why was it weaker during the first period, before the agricultural transformation? One might argue that the ties between employer and employee were stronger before the agricultural transformation (Bengtsson 2000; Solar 1995) and that the social distances between and within various groups were smaller. The enclosure movement broke up the villages, and that destroyed social networks and alliances. New landless and semi-landless groups were created by the movement and the

commercialization of agriculture increased the market dependency of both landless and semi-landless.

6.