Child day‐labourers in agriculture: evidence from farm accounts, 1740–18501

While child labour has always been an important part of the industrial revolution story, there is little quantitative evidence about the number of child workers in the 1740–1850 period. This article estimates trends in the percentage of the agricultural day‐labouring workforce that were children. By using the wage level to identify child workers, it is possible to estimate child labour for a large sample of English farms. It is found that girls were rarely employed as day‐labourers, while boys were employed about as frequently as women. The percentage of boys in the day‐labour workforce increased until the 1820s and then declined.     

The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution

The new meta‐narrative of the industrial revolution contends that Britain was a high wage economy and that this itself caused industrialization. Contemporary inventions, although derived from scientific discoveries shared with mainland Europe, could only be profitable in the context of Britain's factor prices. Therefore, important inventions were only developed in Britain where they enabled access to a growth path that transcended trajectories associated with more labour‐intensive production methods. The criticism presented here concerns perspective and methodology. The account of the high wage economy is misleading because it focuses on men and male wages, underestimates the relative caloric needs of women and children, and bases its view of living standards on an ahistorical and false household economy. A more accurate picture of the structure and functioning of working‐class households provides an alternative explanation of inventive and innovative activity in terms of the availability of cheap and amenable female and child labour and thereby offers a broader interpretation of the industrial revolution.     

Spinning the industrial revolution

The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's ‘high wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high wage economy’ in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low‐productivity, low‐wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.     

Men at work. Wages and industriousness in southern Sweden 1500–1850

ABSTRACT

In his classic works on the industrious revolution, Jan de Vries argues that demand for new consumer goods trigged eighteenth century Europeans to work more. This implies that industrious behaviour and new consumption patterns were two parallel and interdependent processes that preceded the industrial revolution. However, there is an alternative explanation for any increase in labour output on household level, namely that the labourers were forced to work more to meet ends. An indication of this could be that day labourers’ relative wages decreased over time. In this article, we investigate this by studying wages from annual and casual labour in southern Sweden and compare their levels with consumption baskets.     

Child Labour: a survey of selected Asian countries

While the African continent has the highest child labour force participation rates, Asia contains the largest pool of child workers. The nature, magnitude and decline in child labour vary sharply between Asian countries. East Asia now has little child labour; however, child labour continues to have a significant presence in South Asia and in parts of Southeast Asia. This paper surveys the literature on child labour in selected Asian countries, paying special attention to its causes and consequences. The evidence presented shows that Asian child labour, especially in South and Southeast Asia, has some common features. For example, the bulk of child labour is in the 10–14 years age group. The phenomenon is largely rural, and child domestic labour constitutes a significant share. The participation rate of Asian children in the 15–17 years age group in economic activities, 48.4 per cent, is the highest in the world. There is a significant gender element in Asian child labour with boys outnumbering girls in economically active work, while the reverse is the case with domestic child labour. A focus of the survey is the empirical findings that provide insights into the policy instruments that may be needed in combating this phenomenon. The survey also discusses some of the important international and national initiatives that have been taken to reduce child labour.     

Structural Change and Industrial Relations During the Soeharto Period an Approaching Crisis?

This paper examines the evolution of the Indonesian industrial relations system and labour welfare in the New Order period, giving special attention to labour policies and unrest in the 1980s and early 1990s. The tightly controlled industrial relations system which emerged after 1965 is contrasted with the labour activism of the Sukarno era. It is argued that the greater de facto freedoms granted to industrial labour in recent years are an inevitable outcome of growing political openness, concentration of industrial labour around Jakarta and the vulnerability of new industries to domestic and international criticism of labour conditions. It is also contended that intensified labour action is unlikely to bring about a general improvement in worker welfare, although it can overcome some of the worst abuses of labour laws.     

Cities,market integration,and going to sea: stunting and the standard of living in early nineteenth‐century England and Wales1

A new source, 1840s Admiralty seamen's tickets, is used to explore three anthropometric issues. First, did being born in a city, with its associated disamenities, lead to stunting? Second, did being born near a city, whose markets sucked away foodstuffs, lead to stunting? Third, did child labour lead to stunting? We find that only those born in very large cities suffered a level of stunting that contemporaries could have observed. Being born near a city, which gave parents opportunities to trade away family calories, and perhaps increased exposure to disease, did not cause stunting. Britain was a well‐integrated market; all families, whatever their locations, had options to trade and faced similar disease environments. Finally, although adults who had gone to sea young were shorter than those who did not enlist until fully grown, going to sea did not stunt. Instead, plentiful food at sea attracted stunted adolescents, who reversed most of their stunting as a result. But child labour at sea was different from other forms of children's work because wages were largely hypothecated to the child as food and shelter onboard. In contrast, where wages were paid to the child or his parents in cash, they became submerged in the household economy and their benefits were shared with other family members.     

Agglomeration externalities and productivity growth: US cities, 1880–1930

We investigate the role of industrial structure in labour productivity growth in manufacturing in US cities during the ‘second industrial revolution’. We find that initially greater specialization was associated with faster subsequent productivity growth but that only the very high levels of diversity which obtained in some very large cities had a positive correlation. We interpret our results as demonstrating the existence of dynamic Marshallian externalities. The impact of industrial specialization in our sample of US cities after 1890 is found to have raised the level of labour productivity in manufacturing by about 4 per cent by 1920.     

Gender, Time Use, and Public Policy over the Life Cycle

In this paper we compare gender differences in the allocationof time to market work, domestic work, child care, and leisureover the life cycle. Time-use profiles for these activity categoriesare constructed on survey data for three countries: Australia,the UK, and Germany. We discuss the extent to which gender differencesand life-cycle variation in time use can be explained by publicpolicy, focusing on the tax treatment of the female partnerand on access to high-quality, affordable child care. Profilesof time use, earnings, and taxes are compared over the lifecycle defined on age as well as on phases that represent thekey transitions in the life cycle of a typical household. Ourcontention is that, given the decision to have children, life-cycletime use and consumption decisions of households are determinedby them and by public policy. Before children arrive, the adultmembers of the household have high labour supplies and plentyof leisure. The presence of pre-school children, in combinationwith the tax treatment of the second earner's income and thecost of bought-in child care, dramatically change the patternof time use, leading to large falls in female labour supply.We also highlight the fact that, in the three countries we study,female labour supply exhibits a very high degree of heterogeneityafter the arrival of children, and we show that this has importantimplications for public policy. Footnotes ¹ E-mail addresses: pfapps{at}law.usyd.edu.au; ray.rees{at}lrz.uni-muenchen.de     

Factor prices and induced technical change in the industrial revolution

Using historical data for the 1700–1914 period, this paper analyses the nature and direction of technical change in Britain. The evidence in this paper indicates that, over this long period, labour-saving technology adoption was a major response to changes in relative factor prices, thus supporting the hypothesis that ‘induced innovation’ was a major driver of technical change during the British industrial revolution. Labour saving was made possible and sustained by capital-augmenting and energy-augmenting technical change coupled with continuous capital accumulation and abundant energy supplies. This process placed the British economy on a higher capital–labour ratio equilibrium, and was the primary force driving sustained productivity growth, which further raised wages and living standards.     

Skandinaviska Banken i del svenska bankväsendets historia 1914 –1939

Abstract

In analyses of the prerequisites of the industrial revolution in Europe, interest during recent times has centred to a large extent upon proto-industrialisation, or the period of industrial growth in agrarian society prior to the modern industrialisation of the nineteenth century. It has been claimed that the development of industry in agrarian society was significant because it created industrial employment, capitalistic social relationships with wage-paid labour and capital accumulation, and inter-regional markets.¹ In this way proto-industrialisation prepared the ground for the west European industrial revolution, creating conditions crucially different, for example, from the ones prevailing in those underdeveloped countries which sought in vain to achieve industrialisation during the twentieth century.²     

Causal effects of family income on educational investment and child outcomes: Evidence from a policy reform in Japan

The Child Allowance Policy (CAP) in Japan, a nationwide cash transfer program for families with children, was designed to increase household expenditures toward children. Using unforeseen changes in the CAP that occurred due to the electoral results as a source of exogenous variation in income in the early 2010s, this paper examines the causal impact of family income on households’ private educational expenditures and child outcomes in the short-run, based on a longitudinal parent-child survey. The ordinary least squares (OLS) and first-differenced (FD) results show that family income is in most cases positively correlated with child's cognitive outcomes, and, to a lesser extent, with families’ educational expenditure on their children. Based on the FD instrumental variable (FD-IV) estimation, using unexpected changes in CAP payments as an instrument, we find positive income effects on educational expenditure in the short-run. However, we did not find statistically significant impacts on children's cognitive outcomes.     

Poverty and Other Determinants of Child Labor in Bangladesh

In this research we examine poverty and other determinants of child labor in Bangladesh. We define income quintiles as a means of measuring family poverty and add child and family characteristics to our model. We estimate the likelihood that a child will work, using separate logistic regression models for younger and older boys and girls in urban and rural areas. Our results support the notion that a family's poverty affects the probability that a child will work; keeping children away from work is a luxury these families cannot afford. Moreover, it is important to examine separate demographic groups in order to fully understand the determinants of child labor in Bangladesh since the effects of child and family variables on the probability that a child will work differ among these groups.     

The gender division of labour in early modern England

This article presents new evidence of gendered work patterns in the pre-industrial economy, providing an overview of women's work in early modern England. Evidence of 4,300 work tasks undertaken by particular women and men was collected from three types of court documents (coroners’ reports, church court depositions, and quarter sessions examinations) from five counties in south-western England (Cornwall, Devon, Hampshire, Somerset, and Wiltshire) between 1500 and 1700. The findings show that women participated in all the main areas of the economy. However, different patterns of gendered work were identified in different parts of the economy: craft work showed a sharp division of labour and agriculture a flexible division of labour, while differences of gender were less pronounced in everyday commerce. Quantitative evidence of early modern housework and care work in England indicates that such work used less time and was less family-based than is often assumed. Comparisons with gendered work patterns in early modern Germany and Sweden are drawn and show strong similarities to England. In conclusion it is argued that the gender division of labour cannot be explained by a single factor, as different influences were at play in different parts of the economy.     

Entrepreneurs,formalization of social ties,and trustbuilding in Europe (fourteenth to twentieth centuries)1

The establishment of trust is a key component of economic activity and social ties can make business dealings work better. However, we do not know much about how economic actors created new social ties deliberately in order to pursue their objectives. This article analyses the way in which merchants and entrepreneurs used specific rituals to establish formal social ties, with the intent of protecting their business relationships. It focuses on relational instruments that until now had been neglected, particularly godparenthood and marriage witnessing. It shows that formalization, ritualization, and publicity of ties were used by entrepreneurs to establish trust with their business associates, for example when information was asymmetric or when institutions were perceived as inefficient in guaranteeing mutual good behaviour. The analysis covers a long period, from the late middle ages to today. It pays particular attention to the consequences of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth. Contrary to the received wisdom, it suggests that formal social ties such as godparenthood continued to play an important role in economic activity during and after the industrial revolution. New databases on early modern Italy and nineteenth‐century France are used.     

Motivation of Parent–Child Co‐residence Behavior: Evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study

This paper examines the motivations of parent‐child co‐residence behavior in China using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. We test three possible motives: social norms, self‐interest and altruism. We find that social norms play an important role in household co‐residence behavior, showing that the belief that “sons take care of parents” is strong, and children in different birth orders take different responsibilities. Taking the one‐child policy as a natural experiment, we compared co‐residence behavior between only‐child and multi‐child families. This allowed us to test whether children in multi‐child families with wealthier parents more often co‐reside in order to compete for a bequest. We find that parents' wealth is more appealing to children in multi‐child families. The results support the life cycle theory that co‐residence decisions are motivated by self‐interest. We also find some evidence of altruism when parents and children make co‐residence decisions. These findings provide some insights for designing future elder‐support policies in China.     

Wages,prices, and technology in early Catalan industrialization

Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British industrial revolution. The roots of this process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became integrated into international trade, and a successful printed calico industry concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning jenny in Catalonia had occurred earlier, in the 1790s. In line with Allen, this article explores whether relative factor prices played a role in the widespread adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. First, series of real wages in Barcelona are supplied for the period 1500–1808. Second, the prices of labour and capital are compared and the potential profitability of the adoption of the spinning jenny is analysed. Findings show that although Catalonia was not a high wage economy in the way that Britain was in the second half of the eighteenth century, evidence from the cotton spinning sector confirms the relevance of relative factor prices in the adoption of new technology. Within the booming cotton sector after the 1780s, high wages created strong incentives for the adoption of the labour‐saving spinning jenny.     

The Impact of Public Works Programme on Child Labour in Ethiopia

Given the conventional wisdom that poverty and associated income shocks are the fundamental causes of child labour, from a policy perspective, there is a perception that social safety net programmes can play a vital role in reducing child labour. While there is extensive evidence that shows the prevalence of child labour is low among beneficiaries of conditional cash transfer programmes, the impact of workfare programs on child labour has been rarely investigated in the economics literature. This paper addresses the issue by evaluating the impact of the public works component of the Productive Safety Net Programme implemented in Ethiopia in 2005. The programme aims to help poor households to build assets and develop resilience to shocks through employment in public projects. Results from child fixed effects estimations show that children in programme beneficiary households are significantly less likely than their counterparts in non‐beneficiary households to be involved in child labour. The findings suggest that, if well targeted, even safety net programmes that do not primarily target child outcomes can be useful in addressing child labour problems.     

Carin Israelsson,Kor och människor. Nötkreatursskötsel och besättningsstorlekar på torp och herrgårdar 1850–1914

Abstract

During the 18th and the early 19th centuries there was one main dynamic factor in the Swedish economy: the merchant houses of Stockholm and Gothenburg. Their dynamic power derived from their especial role in capital accumulation and in international credit movements. Many of these houses were at that time helping to finance the Swedish iron industry. Later, during the industrial revolution, many of them were to make decisive contributions, as entrepreneurs, financiers and exporters, to the building of the Swedish forest industries. Not until then did their true dynamic power make itself felt; before the industrial revolution the generally stationary state of the economy had prevented any significant number of innovations. But in so far as there were innovations in the economic life of pre-industrial Sweden, they were due to these merchant houses.