Robert C. Allen

Tommy Bengtsson

Martin Dribe

Why did Europe experience industrialisation and modern economic growth before China, India or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic History and one that has provoked intense debate. The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. The established view, dating back to Adam Smith, is that the gap emerged long before the Industrial Revolution, perhaps thousands of years ago. While this view has been called into question - and many of the explanations for it greatly undermined - the issue demands much more empirical research than has yet been undertaken. How did the standard of living in Europe and Asia compare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The present book proposes an answer by considering evidence of three sorts. The first is economic, focusing on income, food production, wages, and prices. The second is demographic, comparing heights, life expectancy and other demographic indicators. The third combines the economic and demographic by investigating the demographic vulnerability to short-term economic stress. The contributions show the highly complex and diverse pattern of the standard of living in the pre-industrial period. The general picture emerging is not one of a great divergence between East and West, but instead one of considerable similarities. These similarities not only pertain to economic aspects of standard of living but also to demography and the sensitivity to economic fluctuations. In addition to these similarities, there were also pronounced regional differences within the East and within the West - regional differences that in many cases were larger than the average differences between Europe and Asia. This clearly highlights the importance of analysing several dimensions of the standard of living, as well as the danger of neglecting regional, social, and household specific differences when assessing the level of well-being in the past.

New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe

Living Standards in the Past

Professor of Demography and Economic History Tommy Bengtsson

Cameron Campbell

James Z. Lee

Professor of History and Social Science James Z Lee

This highly original book -- the first in a series analyzing historical population behavior in Europe and Asia -- pioneers a new approach to the comparative analysis of societies in the past. Using techniques of event history analysis, the authors examine 100,000 life histories in 100 rural communities in Western Europe and Asia to analyze the demographic response to social and economic pressures. In doing so they challenge the accepted Eurocentric Malthusian view of population processes and demonstrate that population behavior has not been as uniform as previously thought -- that it has often been determined by human agency, particularly social structure and cultural practice. The authors examine the complex relationship between human behavior and social and economic environment, analyzing age, gender, family, kinship, social class and social organization, climate, food prices, and real wages to compare mortality responses to adversity. Their research at the individual, household, and community levels challenges the previously accepted characterizations of social and economic behavior in Europe and Asia in the past. The originality of the analysis as well as the geographic breadth and historical depth of the data make Life Under Pressure a significant advance in the field of historical demography. Its findings will be of interest to scholars in economics, environmental studies, demography, history, and sociology as well as the general reader interested in these subjects.

Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900

Life Under Pressure

Nico Keilman

This open access book describes methods of mortality forecasting and discusses possible improvements. It contains a selection of previously unpublished and published papers, which together provide a state-of-the-art overview of statistical approaches as well as behavioural and biological perspectives. The different parts of the book provide discussions of current practice, probabilistic forecasting, the linearity in the increase of life expectancy, causes of death, and the role of cohort factors. The key question in the book is whether it is possible to project future mortality accurately, and if so, what is the best approach. This makes the book a valuable read to demographers, pension planners, actuaries, and all those interested and/or working in modelling and forecasting mortality.

Old and New Perspectives on Mortality Forecasting

Tommy Bengtsson The Swedish welfare model of the 1960s and 1970s excited great interest among many other countries. Today it still is an ideal image for some but a warning for many others. The reason why opinion about the Swedish welfare model has changed is primarily Sweden's financial problems, which are associated with a badly financed and excessively large public sector. It is argued that the size of the budget deficit is a great problem in itself, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that the large public sector has negative effects on the entire economy since it lead to inefficient allocation of resources. A first step in order to solve these problems is to examine how they arose. The questions then are to what extent the large public sector which Sweden has today results from social entitlements which have come into existence since the 1960s, from the maturing of welfare systems decided upon earlier, from unfavourable demographic developments, or from economic stagnation, and how these factors are interlinked. What is quite clear is that Sweden has had very low economic growth during the 1970s and 1980s compared with the preceding period. But so have many other industrial countries, without their having in consequence found themselves in diffi culties as great as Sweden's. Therefore economic stagnation alone cannot explain Sweden's situation.

Population, Economy, and Welfare in Sweden

Geraldine P. Mineau

Intergenerational research is crucial in understanding long term demographic trends. This book examines the ways kinship affects demographic behavior, including mortality patterns to determine the influence of fertility patterns, the contribution of parents’ longevity, and the affects of a family history of disease. It emphasizes the importance of studies that include and compare other factors related to social organization with information on multi-generational families.

Tommy Bengtsson

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