What Did the Old Poor Law Really Accomplish? A Redux

Abstract

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

Political Institutions, Economic Liberty, and the Great Divergence

“…Because Europeans traded so much, they eventually developed vibrant insurance markets, both private and social, thereby enabling them to more fully realize the wealth-creating potential of trade. In Britain, for example, Greif and Iyigun (2012a, 2012b) highlight the importance of the Old Poor Law.…”

Lessons for Today from Past Periods of Rapid Technological Change

“…By the 19th century, this law had come to serve as a means of dealing with a lagging agricultural sector (Blaug, 1964). Greif and Igiyum (2013) find that it was successful in reducing food riots up through most of the 18th century. This was a "passive" response to industrialization, as the law was developed under different economic circumstances.…”