Malthus in cointegration space: evidence of a post-Malthusian pre-industrial England

Post‐Malthusian Dynamics in Pre‐Industrial Scandinavia

“…While the vast majority of existing empirical investigations of Malthusian stagnation are not directly concerned with the post-Malthusian phase and the period of transition from stagnation to growth, Møller and Sharp (2014) formulate and test a simple post-Malthusian model with persistent technology shocks. 2 Using annual series of real wages, marriage rates, birth rates and death rates 1 The transition from stagnation to growth has been analyzed by Weil, 1999, 2000;Galor and Moav, 2002;Hansen and Prescott, 2002;Lucas, 2002;Lagerlöf, 2003;Doepke, 2004;Galor, 2005;O'Rourke et al, 2014;Strulik and Weisdorf, 2008;Dalgaard and Strulik, 2010) and others.…”

“…The research adopts the method developed in Møller and Sharp (2014) to investigate the presence of a post-Malthusian period in the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. 3 There are two main advantages to studying these countries, compared to existing analyses of Malthusian dynamics in other countries.…”

“…5 Table 1 gives a broad indication of how the Scandinavian countries compared to England in terms of economic development. The table reports that the Norwegian and Swedish levels of GDP per capita in 1700 were the same as for the United Kingdom in the 1500s for which the analysis in Møller and Sharp (2014), using English data, begins. Likewise, the income per capita of Denmark in 1820 was at the level of that in the United Kingdom in 1700.…”

“…However, the onsets of economic take-o↵s occurred later in Scandinavia than in the United Kingdom. Denmark took o↵ around the 1880s, largely through highly mechanized 3 The analysis in Møller and Sharp (2014) is the first formal time-series based econometric framework designed to describe the transition period and potential post-Malthusian dynamics. However, other empirical studies that focus on the strict Malthusian model have found results that are compatible with the existence of a non-Malthusian economy before the Industrial Revolution (Nicolini, 2007;Pfister and Fertig, 2010;Klemp, 2012, see e.g.…”

The response of vital rates to harvest fluctuations in pre-industrial Sweden

“…Earlier international research on the effect of economic stress on the population in the pre-industrial period has largely relied on real wages or grain prices as indicators of living or nutritional standards (Wrigley and Schofield 1989, pp. 368-384;Galloway 1988Galloway , 1994Lee and Anderson 2002;Nicolini 2007;Bengtsson and Broström 2011;Bengtsson and Ohlsson 1985;Dribe 2003;Crafts and Mills 2009;Pfister and Fertig 2010;Chiarini 2010;Klemp 2012;Møller and Sharp 2014;Klemp and Møller forthcoming). 1 Malthusians often point to the development of real wages, which fell from the late Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century, to advance their main proposition that population growth outpaced production (Allen 2001;Clark 2007).…”