Infant Mortality and the Health of Survivors: Britain 1910-1950

The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid improvements in the health and height of British children. Average height and health can be related to infant mortality through a positive selection effect and a negative scarring effect. Examining town-level panel data on the heights of school children I find no evidence for the selection effect but some support for the scarring effect. The results suggest that the improvement in the disease environment, as reflected by the decline in infant mortality, increased average height by about half a centimeter per decade in the first half of the twentieth century.health in Britain, heights of children, infant mortality

The Cliometrics of International Migration: A Survey

This is a survey of some of the key studies in the literature on international migration in history that may be described as cliometric. This literature uses the concepts and approaches of applied economics to investigate a range of historical issues and there are strong parallels with the questions that have been addressed in the literature on contemporary migrations. Here I focus on the period 1850 to 1940 and chiefly on migration from Europe to the New World. The survey is organised around six themes that include: the forces driving migration, over time and across space; the assimilation of migrants and their effects on wages and income distribution in source and destination countries; and the evolution of immigration policy. While this literature has drawn heavily on the tool kit of applied economists it also provides a wider perspective on many of the issues that concern migration today.international migration, economic history

Immigration and Inter-Regional Mobility in the UK, 1982-2000

The possible effects of higher immigration, raising unemployment and lowering earnings for locals, has been a contentious empirical issue and it has recently come to the fore in Britain. Most studies that look across local labour markets, chiefly for the US but recently for the UK, have found the effects of immigration to be benign. One possibility is that an influx of immigrants from abroad to a specific area simply pushes non-immigrants onwards to other localities and thereby spreads the labour market effects over the whole economy. We investigate this issue looking at net internal migration across 11 UK regions over two decades. While we find consistently negative crowding out effects, the results are not statistically very strong. Neither are they enhanced when embedded in a model that includes other variables that drive inter-regional migration or one that examines bilateral population flows between regions. We conclude that this particular channel of adjustment is fairly weak.UK immigration, inter-regional migration

Immigrants Assimilate as Communities, not just as Individuals

There is a large econometric literature that examines the economic assimilation of immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. On the whole immigrants are seen as atomistic individuals assimilating in a largely anonymous labour market, a view that runs counter to the spirit of the equally large literature on ethnic groups. Here we argue that immigrants assimilate as communities, not just as individuals. The longer the immigrant community has been established the better adjusted it is to the host society and the more the host society comes to accept that ethnic group. Thus economic outcomes for immigrants should depend not just on their own characteristics, but also on the legacy of past immigration from the same country. In this paper we test this hypothesis using data from a 5 percent sample of the 1980, 1990 and 2000 US censuses. We find that history matters in immigrant assimilation: the stronger is the tradition of immigration from a given source country, the better the economic outcomes for new immigrants from that source.immigrant earnings, migration history, ethnic groups.

Refugees and asylum seekers, the crisis in Europe and the future of policy

The recent asylum crisis has highlighted the inadequacies of European asylum policies. The existing asylum system, which encourages migrants to make hazardous maritime or overland crossings to gain access to an uncertain prospect of obtaining refugee status, is inefficient, poorly targeted and lacks public support. In the long run it should be replaced by a substantial joint programme of refugee resettlement that would help those most in need of protection, that would eliminate the risks to refugees, and that would command more widespread public support. Analysis of key facts and data includes the determinants of asylum applications and trends in public opinion. In this light I evaluate the feasibility of three elements for reform: first, implementing tougher border controls to reduce unauthorised entry; second, promoting direct resettlement of refugees from countries of first asylum; and third, expanding refugee-hosting capacity through enhanced burden-sharing among destination countries

Emigration from the UK, 1870-1913 and 1950-1998

The international labour market has not been ?globalised? to the same degree over the last 40 years as have international markets for goods and capital. Immigration policies in developed economies clearly hinder the mobility of labour. But how much difference does it actually make? This paper compares emigration from Britain to four principal destinations in the era of free migration before 1914 with emigration to the same places since the 1960s. As the doors were kept open to British emigrants for longer than most, the ?deglobalisation? of British labour only dates from the 1960s. Since that time there has been a secular fall in British emigration, and this has been a major component in the transformation of the UK from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration. Before 1914 the economic and demographic forces that drove British emigration can be clearly identified. The same effects, applied to the later period, suggest that mass emigration from Britain should have continued until the early 1990s. But from the mid 1960s these influences became less powerful as they were increasingly inhibited by immigration policies in the principal destination countries. The decline in emigration is largely accounted for by shifts in policy, especially those that curtailed or abolished the preferences previously extended to settlers from the UK

Vanishing Third World Emigrants?

This paper documents a stylized fact: the Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to accelerate those trends. The paper estimates the economic and demographic fundamentals driving these emigration life cycles to the United States since 1970 – income and education gaps between the US and the sending country, poverty traps and the size of the cohort at risk in the sending country, and the migrant stock in the US. It then projects the life cycle up to 2024. The projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration over the next two decades will not increase, after which it will decline. It also suggests that future US immigrants will be more African and less Hispanic than in the past.Third World, emigration, development, life cycle

International Migration in the Long-Run: Positive Selection, Negative Selection and Policy

Most labor scarce overseas countries moved decisively to restrict their immigration during the first third of the 20th century. This autarchic retreat from unrestricted and even publicly-subsidized immigration in the first global century before World War I to the quotas and bans introduced afterwards was the result of a combination of factors: public hostility towards new immigrants of lower quality public assessment of the impact of those immigrants on a deteriorating labor market, political participation of those impacted, and, as a triggering mechanism, the sudden shocks to the labor market delivered by the 1890s depression, the Great War, postwar adjustment and the great depression. The paper documents the secular drift from very positive to much more negative immigrant selection which took place in the first global century after 1820 and in the second global century after 1950, and seeks explanations for it. It then explores the political economy of immigrant restriction in the past and seeks historical lessons for the present.

The Effects on Stature of Poverty, Family Size and Birth Order: British Children in the 1930s

This paper examines effects of socio-economic conditions on the standardised heights and body mass index of children in Interwar Britain. It uses the Boyd Orr cohort, a survey of predominantly poor families taken in 1937-9, which provides a unique opportunity to explore the determinants of child health in the era before the welfare state. We examine the trade-off between the quality (in the form of health outcomes) and the number of children in the family at a time when genuine poverty still existed in Britain. Our results provide strong support both for negative birth order effects and negative family size effects on the heights of children. No such effects are found for the body mass index (BMI). We find that household income per capita positively influences the heights of children but, even after accounting for this, the number of children in the family still has a negative effect on height. This latter effect is closely associated with overcrowding and particularly with the degree of cleanliness or hygiene in the household, which conditions exposure to factors predisposing to disease. We also analyse evidence collected retrospectively, which indicates that the effects of childhood conditions on height persisted into adulthood.child health, heights, poverty