842 research outputs found

    Poor Relief, Informal Assistance, and Short Time During the Lancashire Cotton Famine

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    [Excerpt] This paper presents new evidence concerning the importance of poor relief as a source of income assistance for unemployed operatives during the Lancashire cotton famine. My comparison of weekly data on the number of relief recipients in 23 distressed poor law unions with estimates of weekly cotton consumption for the period November 1861 to December 1862 suggests that the average length of time between becoming unemployed and receiving poor relief was less than 2 months. This result is shown to be consistent with available evidence on working class saving. Given the meager amount of informal assistance available to them, most operatives were forced to turn to the poor law for income assistance within 4 to 8 weeks of becoming unemployed

    Malthus Was Right After All: Poor Relief and Birth Rates in Southeastern England

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    The payment of child allowances to laborers with large families was widespread in early nineteenth-century England. This paper tests Thomas Malthus\u27s hypothesis that child allowances caused the birth rate to increase. A cross-sectional regression model is estimated to explain variations in birth rates across parishes in 1826-30. Birth rates are found to be related to child allowances, income, and the availability of housing, as Malthus contended. The paper concludes by examining the role played by the adoption of child allowances after 1795 in the fertility increase of the early nineteenth century

    The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto

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    [Excerpt] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published 150 years ago in London in February 1848, is one of the most influential and widely-read documents of the past two centuries. The historian A. J. P. Taylor (1967, p. 7) has called it a holy book, and contends that because of it, everyone thinks differently about politics and society. And yet, despite its enormous influence in the 20th century, the Manifesto is very much a period piece, a document of what was called the hungry 1840s. It is hard to imagine it being written in any other decade of the 19th century. The critique of capitalism offered by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto is understandable in the context of economic conditions in Britain from 1837 to 1848, and it is not that different, in places, from the conclusions reached by other social critics during the 1840s. This paper attempts to place the Manifestos analysis of capitalist economic development in historical perspective. I begin by summarizing the economic arguments of Marx and Engels. While the Manifesto-was written by Marx, its economic analysis was strongly influenced by Engels\u27s practical experience of capitalism in his family\u27s cotton firm in Manchester, England, in 1842-44. Upon his return to Germany, Engels published in 1845 a scathing indictment of early industrial capitalism, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Much of Engels\u27s critique of British capitalism reappears in greatly condensed form in Section I of the Manifesto. The second part of the paper examines the economic, social, and political conditions in Manchester and the surrounding south Lancashire cotton towns in the 1830s and 1840s, drawing largely on the views of contemporary observers. I then look at recent research on the standard of living of the working class from 1820 to 1851, focusing on conditions in the Lancashire cotton industry during the hungry \u2740s. Finally, I examine economic conditions in England in the two or three decades after the Manifesto was published, and briefly discuss why Marx and Engels\u27s predictions for the imminent collapse of capitalism were so wide of the mark

    [Review of the book \u3ci\u3eInterwar Unemployment in International Perspective\u3c/i\u3e]

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    [Excerpt] The book redresses two imbalances in the recent literature on interwar unemployment: its almost exclusive focus on the United States and Britain, and its predominantly macroeconomic nature. To achieve these goals, the editors encouraged the authors of the country studies to address a set of microeconomic issues, including the extent to which the incidence and duration of unemployment varied across economic and demographic groups, and the effect of unemployment on labor force participation and poverty. Two macroeconomic issues also are addressed in several of the papers: the effects of real wages and of unemployment insurance on unemployment. These two issues have been hotly debated in the recent literature on interwar unemployment in the United States and Britain, and their discussion here for other industrialized countries represents a significant addition to the current debate

    [Review of the book \u3ci\u3eThe Scottish Poor Law, 1745-1845\u3c/i\u3e]

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    [Excerpt] While much has been written in the past 20 years concerning the Old Poor Law in England, very little attention has been given to the development of the Scottish Poor Law. This is surprising, given that the Scottish Poor Law differed radically from its English counterpart in its response to the increasing poverty of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. R. A. Cage\u27s descriptive account of the administration of the Poor Law in Scotland from 1745 to 1845 is therefore a welcome addition to the existing literature on the early development of the British social welfare system

    Editor\u27s Introduction (Review Symposium on \u3ci\u3eConverging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems\u3c/i\u3e)

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    [Excerpt] During the past two decades there have been significant changes in employment systems across industrialized countries. Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems, by Harry C. Katz and Owen Darbishire, examines changes since 1980 in employment practices in seven industrialized countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and Italy—with a focus on the automotive and telecommunications industries. Katz and Darbishire find that variations in employment patterns within these countries have been increasing over the past two decades. The increase in variation is not simply a result of a decline in union strength in some sectors of the economy; variation has increased within both union and nonunion sectors. Despite this within-country divergence, Katz and Darbishire find that employment systems across countries are converging toward four common patterns of work practices: a low-wage employment pattern; the human resource management (HRM) employment pattern; a Japanese-oriented employment pattern; and a joint team-based employment pattern. Significant differences in national employment-related institutions have resulted in some variation across countries in how these work patterns are implemented. Still, Katz and Darbishire find that there are many commonalities in the employment systems of the seven countries and in the processes through which these commonalities have developed

    Labour Migration in Southern and Eastern England, 1861-1901

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    This paper examines the determinants of migration from 19 southern counties to six major destinations in England and Wales from 1861-70 to 1891-1900. I find that, while the size of origin-destination wage gaps and the distance between origin and destination areas were important determinants of migration flows, as expected, migration was also strongly influenced by the number of previous migrants from an origin county living in a destination. The assistance provided by previous migrants to friends and relatives contemplating migration led to a perpetuation of earlier migration patterns, and helps to explain the continued dominance of London as a destination for migrants in the 1890s

    Labor Economics

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    The authors hypothesize that most labor economists sooner or later had to incorporate at least the appearance of institutional concerns in their papers to avoid indigestion whenever lunching with colleagues outside the field of economics They add: If the new interests of modern labor economics are in fact driven by the imperatives of science, then the institutionalist and the neoclassical approaches may well synthesize

    Unemployment and the UK Labour Market Before, During and After the Golden Age

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    During the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s unemployment in Britain averaged 2 per cent. This was far lower than ever before or since and a number of hypotheses have been put forward to account for this unique period in labour market history. But there has been little attempt to isolate precisely how the determinants of wage setting and unemployment differed before, during and after the golden age. We estimate a two-equation model over the whole period from 1872 to 1999 using a newly constructed set of long-run labour market data. We find that the structure of real wage setting was different in the golden age, consistent with notions about the postwar consensus, but it did not result in wages that were significantly lower relative to productivity than during other eras. Rapid growth in productivity and world trade together with low interest rates did keep unemployment lower during the golden age than after the 1970s. But the key difference between the golden age and the periods before and after was shifts in labour demand that are not accounted for by any of the variables that are usually thought to determine the equilibrium unemployment rate

    Migration and Labour Market Integration in Late Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

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    [Excerpt] There is a long and well established tradition of studies analysing the pattern and causes of internal migration and assessing the degree of labour market integration in late nineteenth-century Britain. Some studies document the flows of migrants from one area to another and describe migrant characteristics and the directions of the predominant streams of migration. Others analyse the determinants of gross or net migration flows at the region or county level. The questions implicit in these studies are: How mobile was the labour force? What were the major factors which determined individual decisions to migrate? How are these factors reflected in differences in migration flows between regions and in the pattern of long distance and short distance migration? Did labour mobility increase during the nineteenth century? There is also a strand of the literature which studies the effects of migration and labour mobility on the growth of industries, cities, and regions and above all on wage rates and wage differentials. The questions here are: How far did migration serve to integrate labour markets within and between regions and sectors? Do movements in regional and sectoral wage rates provide evidence of labour market integration? Did the degree of integration increase during the nineteenth century? In this article we provide a framework within which these questions can be addressed and which links together these two separate strands of the literature. Some of the existing literature is reviewed within this framework, and new evidence offered on the questions raised above. The article is organized as follows. In section I a simple framework is set out which stresses the links between migration and labour market integration. In section II the evidence on the character of migration flows, their magnitude and direction is examined. Section III focuses on the determinants of migration flows at the county level, particularly from rural southern counties. This is followed, in section W, with an examination of the effect of rural-urban migration on agricultural wage rates. Section V considers the evidence on regional labour market integration, and is followed by a brief conclusion summarizing the results
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