Social Security as a Developmental Institution? Extending the Solar Case for the Relative Efficacy of Poor Relief Provisions under the English Old Poor Law

Smith, Richard

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1297194

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…17 Nor could these policies ever be expected to have much impact on the steady-state wealth distribution (as would allow people to break out of the poverty trap in Figure 1). However, it is clear that the Poor Laws did provide a degree of protection, and it has been argued that they helped break the historical link between harvest failures and mortality (Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, 2010;Richard Smith, 2011).…”

Section: England's Poor Laws: a Major Policy Response To Poverty Emermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such risks may well spill over into production, with adverse long-term consequences. It has been argued that the Poor Laws did have benefits for longer-term promotion from poverty by enhanced insurance against risk (Solar, 1995;Smith, 2011). By assuring greater social stability, this too would have brought longer term gains.…”

Section: England's Poor Laws: a Major Policy Response To Poverty Emermentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Idea of Antipoverty Policy

Ravallion¹

2013

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Section: England's Poor Laws: a Major Policy Response To Poverty Emermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: England's Poor Laws: a Major Policy Response To Poverty Emermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Idea of Antipoverty Policy

Ravallion¹

2013

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“…18 The role of better nutrition in the decline in morality has been particularly emphasized by McKeown and his co-author and surveyed in Harris (2004). Smith (2008) emphasizes the positive role of the Poor Law in reducing the risk of labor migration.…”

Section: The Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Did the Old Poor Law Really Accomplish? A Redux

Greif

İyigün

2013

SSRN Journal

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu . It establishes that poor relief reduced social unrest from around the late-17th century through the turn of the 19th century, at which point it began to spur population growth and its social stability effects dissipated. These conclusions are based on a new dataset encompassing 39 English counties from 1650 to 1815. It includes observations on the amount of poor relief offered, occurrences of food riots and other types of social unrest, population growth and a host of other variables. The paper first documents that county-level variations in poor relief had a statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful non-monotonic impact on population growth. Aid to the poor reduced population growth through the 1780s or 1820s when it began to exert significantly positive effects. Moreover, the Old Poor Law reduced food riots in the late-17th century and through most of the 18th century, but this effect dissipated in the early 19th century when poor relief began to generate population growth. Our analyses, thus, establish that the Old Poor Law fostered social order and stability for more than a century after which the Malthusian income effects dominated. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SJEL Classification: N0, N33, O10

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“…Notes 1 Recent historical scholarship has sought to date and place more precisely the origins of the industrial revolution, with some (e.g. Smith, 2008) arguing that it can be plausibly seen as the outworking of a centuries-long process in the UK, beginning in the 1600s, of investing in basic social protection (the so-called Poor Law) and identity registration. 2 Pritchett (2006) provides a good overview of these issues, stressing that it is as important to ask who is not poor as who is.…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Poverty and Inequality: A Brief Retrospective and Prospective Analysis

Woolcock

2008

Political Quarterly

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This overview essay on policy responses to global poverty and inequality over the last ten years is structured around four themes. First, drawing on the most recent empirical data, it provides some stylised facts on recent trends in poverty and inequality in developing countries. Second, it considers the distinctive ways in which the UK government in particular has responded to these challenges over the last decade, in the context of the broader global policy eort in which it is embedded. Third, it provides a critique of these responses, ®nding much to both commend and about which to be concerned. On the basis of this assessment, the fourth section considers some options for the next decade, some quite modest and others more ambitious. The ®nal section concludes.

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Social Security as a Developmental Institution? Extending the Solar Case for the Relative Efficacy of Poor Relief Provisions under the English Old Poor Law

Cited by 9 publications

References 11 publications

The Idea of Antipoverty Policy

The Idea of Antipoverty Policy

What Did the Old Poor Law Really Accomplish? A Redux

Global Poverty and Inequality: A Brief Retrospective and Prospective Analysis

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