Changes in Victorian entrepreneurship in England and Wales 1851-1911: Methodology and business population estimates

Abstract

The full population of England and Wales employers and own-account business proprietors is estimated using population censuses 1851-1911. The main contribution of the article is a method of mixed single imputation to overcome the challenge of non-responses to the census 1851-1881. This method is compared with alternatives. Downloads of all data allow replication. The method is used to track trends in proprietor numbers and entrepreneurship rates to reassess the 'decline of Victorian entrepreneurship' , onset of the 'U'-shaped trough of the twentieth century, the 'climacteric' of 1901, and compositional changes by sector and sex. There is strong sector and gender diversity, with changes in female participation major drivers of overall trends. Proprietor numbers show slow increases of employers, and rapid rise and then decline of own-account, with a turning point after 1901. The methodology and turning point is compared and confirmed against the 1921 census and national and local trade directories.

Business Entry and Exit: Career Changes of Proprietors in England and Wales (1851–81) Using Record-Linkage

“…13 This is an example of linkage comparison for 1851-61, showing the transition from one status (row) in 1851, to another status (column) in 1861. The 1851-61 linkage is the fullest from the 11 See Bennett et al 2021. The method adjusted nonresponses using individual occupation string descriptors, sex, relationships within households, demographic filters, and statistical relationships for full employment status responses in 1891 and 1901, where the census design produced more complete responses.…”

“…The digital census records in I-CeM (Schürer and Higgs 2014) give the respondent descriptor strings, but proprietors are not identified directly. They have been extracted in the I-CeMlinked database of BBCE (Bennett et al, 2020) which tags all employers in the census records with their workforce, and those operating on own account with no employees (Bennett et al 2021). The tagging assigns each response to employer, own account status using all synonyms of "employer" and "master", such as "proprietor", "partner", "owner", "landlord/landlady" of an inn, etc., and tagging anyone who stated having employees (or "workers", "hands", etc.…”

“…11 However, this infill covers only the tagged groups of employers and masters. This means that searches for linked 10 See (Bennett et al 2021). The method adjusted non-responses using individual occupation string descriptors, sex, relationships within households, demographic filters, and statistical relationships for full employment status responses in 1891 and 1901, where the census design produced more complete responses.…”

“…Sectors such as refreshments, maker-dealing, retailing, and personal services, which had very low entry costs and barriers, all show high entry rates compared to manufacturing, for both employers and own account. They also had a high and rapidly increasing share of employment and businesses (Lee 1971: 60-6;Bennett et al 2019b: 94-100;2021). Sectors with high exit costs, low elasticity, or high sunk capital and skills had higher stability or inertia from incumbency.…”

The German Trade Shock and the Rise of the Neo-Welfare State in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

“…In many of our regression specifications, we control for 1881 manufacturing employment interacted with year dummies in order to separate the effects of the German trade shock from time-variant effects related to manufacturing. We compute this measure using the fraction of people employed in secondary occupations-those in which raw materials were converted into finished products-according to the classification system developed by Wrigley (2010) and Bennett et al (2017). Figure 4 shows the geographic distribution of import competition in 1910, with and without this control.…”