Portuguese living standards, 1720–1980, in European comparison: heights, income, and human capital¹

Abstract

When and why did the Portuguese become the shortest Europeans? In order to find the answer to this question, we trace the trend in Portuguese living standards from the 1720s until recent times.We find that during the early nineteenth century average height in Portugal did not differ significantly from average height in most other European countries, but that when, around 1850, European anthropometric values began to climb sharply, Portugal's did not. In a panel analysis of 12 countries, we find that delay in human-capital formation was the chief factor hindering any improvement in the biological standard of living in Portugal.I t was Portugal's fifteenth-and sixteenth-century seafaring scientists and explorers who placed this small country at the cutting edge of maritime science and navigation and thereby transformed the global status of the rest of Europe as well. Their expeditions along the African west coast and to Latin America, not to mention Vasco da Gama's discovery, on his first voyage (1497-9), of the sea route to India, transformed their contemporaries' consciousness of the world that lay beyond the horizon. However, since those glory days the Portuguese have come to feel that their country lags behind the rest of Europe-and they are right, if anthropometry is taken as a welfare indicator: recent data indicate that the Portuguese are on average shorter than any other European nationality.2 When and why did the Portuguese slip to last place in the European height race?To tackle this question, a two-step approach is adopted. First, height development is reconstructed over almost three centuries, from the 1720s to the 1980s, and it is found that at the beginning of that time span Portuguese heights were in

A golden age before serfdom? The human capital of Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe in the 17th-19th centuries

“…Currently, Mosaic provides data for 91 regions of historic Europe containing over 700,000 individuals living in 143,000 domestic groups from the Atlantic to the Urals (Szołtysek and Gruber 2014). Sources for NW and S Europe: Stolz et al (2012), see also Tollnek and Baten (2011); Southsouthern Europe in 1630 (1680) refers to the average value of Spain and Portugal during the period 1600-49 (1650-99), see Juif and Baten (2001).…”

“…What broad trends could be identified using this procedure, and how do they compare with those of other European regions? In Figure 7, data from eastern Europe were plotted against the evidence from western and southern European countries, which we derived from Stolz et al 2012 (see also Tollnek and Baten 2011). The authors assessed the northwestern and central European region (Austria, Germany, France, Sweden, and the UK), for which relatively continuous evidence from the 1730s is available, and the southern European region (Italy, Spain, Portugal).…”

Sample-Selection Biases and the Industrialization Puzzle

“…Sample selection problems of the selection-on-unobervables type tend to be minimized when they are discussed at all. A recent study of Portuguese heights is typical in this regard (Stolz, Baten, and Reis 2013). Other researchers make a virtue of the oversampling of the poor and working classes, but this argument confuses the selection-on-observables type with the selection-on-unobservables type.…”

Gross Agricultural Output: A Quantitative, Unified Perspective, 1500–1850

“…We may thus conclude that our findings are not an underestimate of gross agricultural output. Per capita food intake offers us a second opportunity to corroborate our initial output findings, this time using evidence from the field of anthropometric history.52 A recent study regarding the evolution of the height of Portuguese males between 1720 and 1980 has shown that the standard of living and the level of human capital of this population were, in the long run, the principal determinants of stature (Stolz et al 2013). The first of these was measured by these authors using the real wage level, but in the present instance we employ average real food consumption instead.…”