Where there’s muck,there’s brass:1 the market for manure in the industrial revolution2

This article presents the first systematic analysis of off‐farm sources of nitrogen, such as urban and industrial waste, used in English agriculture during the industrial revolution, arguing that their use was widespread and intensive by 1700 and that there was only modest growth in their use up to 1840. It explains the pattern of use by supply and demand factors, and develops a new method to estimate the overall impact on wheat yields. It estimates that throughout the period 1700–1840 yields were 20 per cent higher than they would have been if no off‐farm manures had been used.     

Marital fertility and wealth during the fertility transition: rural France, 1750–1850

It has been long established that the demographic transition began in eighteenth‐century France, yet there is no consensus on exactly why fertility declined. This analysis links fertility life histories to wealth at death data for four rural villages in France, 1750–1850. For the first time, the wealth–fertility relationship during the onset of the French fertility decline can be analysed. Where fertility is declining, wealth is a powerful predictor of smaller family size. This article argues that fertility decline in France was a result of changing levels of economic inequality, associated with the 1789 Revolution. In cross‐section, the data support this hypothesis: where fertility is declining, economic inequality is lower than where fertility is high.     

Social class and the fertility transition: a critical comment on the statistical results reported in Simon Szreter's Fertility,class and gender in Britain, 1860–19401

Simon Szreter's book Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860–1940 argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross‐sectional differences in marital fertility as reported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter's conclusion made the book immediately influential, and it remains so. This finding matters a great deal for debates about the causes of the European fertility decline of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For decades scholars have argued whether the main forces at work were ideational or social and economic. This note reports a simple graphical and statistical re‐analysis of Szreter's own data. We show that social class does explain cross‐sectional differences in English marital fertility in 1911.     

Victorian’s economy in the long run

Annual estimates of the GDP of Victoria for the period 1861–1976/77 are here presented and used as a basis for an analysis of Victoria’s long–run economic growth. Victoria is represented as having fallen behind the per capita GDP of Australia as a whole in the 1870s but to have out–paced the national growth rate from the early twentieth century until the late 1950s. The changing importance of natural resources and of the scope for manufacturing development are seen as the basis for an explanation of the Victorian divergence. The article carries the implication of a need for regional disaggregation in the analysis of Australian economic growth.     

Ready to stop: socioeconomic status and the fertility transition in Stockholm, 1878–1926

The western fertility decline is arguably the most significant demographic change to have occurred in the past 200 years, yet its causes and processes are still shrouded in ambiguity due to a lack of individual‐level longitudinal data. A growing body of research has helped improve our understanding of the decline's causes by examining the development of socioeconomic differences in fertility using historical micro‐data, but these have largely only considered rural areas where fertility was generally slower to decline. This article contributes to the literature by utilizing individual‐level data from the Roteman Database for Stockholm, Sweden between 1878 and 1926 to examine the association of socioeconomic status and fertility and the adoption of stopping behaviour during the city's transition. Using piecewise constant hazard models and logistic regression, we find that a clear class pattern arises in which the elite were early practitioners of fertility control, followed by the working classes. As the transition unfolded, socioeconomic differences in stopping behaviour disappeared and overall fertility differentials were also minimized, both of them being consistent with patterns observed in rural populations. The implications of these findings for major explanations of the decline are discussed in the concluding section.     

Companies' insolvency and ‘the nature of the firm’ in Italy, 1920s–70s1

This article analyses the functioning of Italian insolvency laws and practices, in particular their role in the selection and relaunch of viable firms. The article investigates the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, and focuses on joint‐stock companies. Using comparative data on the number of cases, we show that in Italy firms mainly used the procedure called fallimento (bankruptcy), consisting of the collection and subsequent liquidation of assets. Other procedures, such as deals with creditors or forms of receivership, able to give companies a further chance, were rarely used. On the basis of archival documents we maintain that this result was due to the strictness and complication of Italian procedures, as well as to their inability to select viable companies. The article also investigates the relation between the features of insolvency law and the nature of the Italian industrial system, specifically the peculiar small size and rapid turnover of joint‐stock companies. We suggest that the pro‐liquidation character of the insolvency law might have been one of the causes of the peculiarity of Italian industrial capitalism, even if the opposite direction of causality cannot be excluded.     

Japan’s return to gold: Turning points in the value of the yen during the 1920s

We identify turning points in the value of the yen during the 1920s to determine which factors were perceived by market participants as affecting Japan’s probability of returning to the gold standard. The 1920s were marked by military expansionism, political turmoil, and other dramatic political and institutional events. We conclude that changes of power between the Kenseikai and Seiyukai parties and worsening diplomatic relations with China were primarily responsible for turning points in the value of the yen. The democracy movement and the associated expansion of suffrage seem not to have been viewed as important by contemporaries.     

From plan to market in the health sector?: China’s experience

Countries worldwide confront the challenge of defining and achieving appropriate roles for government and market forces in the health sector. China—as both a developing and a transitional economy—represents an important case. This paper uses an international comparative perspective to examine how the health of China’s population and other aspects of health system performance changed during the reform era. We draw on standard public finance and health economics theory, as well as the more recent incomplete-contracting theory of property rights, to summarize the comparative advantages of government and market for financing and delivery of health services, particularly in developing and transitional economies. We then describe and analyze against this theoretical background the transformation of China’s health sector and recent commitment of government funds to move toward universal coverage.     

Women’s Empowerment and Child Malnutrition: The Case of Mozambique

Using data from the 2011 Demographic and Health Survey in Mozambique this paper checks whether women empowerment has an impact on the nutritional status of children. We evaluate the degree of empowerment of women via multidimensional approaches, making a distinction between five domains: decision making, use of violence by husband/partner, attitude of the woman towards this use of violence, available information, material resources. Each domain includes several questions reflecting different aspects of empowerment. For each domain of empowerment, three different methods of aggregation are used: correspondence analysis, the so‐called Alkire and Foster methodology and the “fuzzy sets” approach. The impact of women empowerment on the nutritional status of children is analyzed via the MIMIC approach. No clear‐cut conclusion concerning the possible impact of women’s empowerment on the nutritional status of children could be drawn. But, ceteris paribus, the material wealth of the household, the educational level of the mother and her BMI are positively correlated with the nutritional status of children which is also higher when the child is female. Finally, there are important differences in the nutritional status of children between the various regions of Mozambique and this nutritional status is in most regions lower in rural areas.     

Basic Needs in the Northern Province and South Africa’s Globalization Agenda

The requirement for the improvement of poor people’s basic needs and overall quality of life is inseparable from concerns with sustainability and state capacity for executing social welfare responsibilities. South Africa has, paradoxically, redefined state role away from social provision, as it replaced the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) with the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy in 1996. Whereas the RDP accorded the state a pivotal role in meeting basic needs, GEAR pursued outward‐looking development. In accordance with the logic of GEAR, the Northern Province Government formulated its Growth and Development Strategy (GDS), essentially an offspring of that macro‐policy. Using the Northern Province as case study, this paper illustrates that GEAR and GDS have engendered outward‐looking development that is also open to the dictates of external forces. It is argued that South Africa and that province are as such inserted into the global system in a way that they cannot shape or domesticate globalization for resolution of their germane development difficulties. We point out that that form of globalization has not led to the improvement of the poor people’s access to basic needs. In conclusion, we urge for the establishment of a strong developmental state that would engender auto‐centeredness. La nécessité de relever le degré de satisfaction des besoins fondamentaux des pauvres et la qualité de vie en général est inséparable des préoccupations de viabilité et de la capacité de l’Etat d’assumer ses responsabilités en matière de protection sociale. Paradoxalement, l’Afrique du Sud a redéfini le rôle de l’Etat en le dissociant des préoccupations sociales, et remplacé le Programme de reconstruction et développement (RDP) par une Stratégie pour la croissance, l’emploi et la redistribution (GEAR) en 1996. Alors que le RDP accordait à l’Etat un rôle central dans la satisfaction des besoins fondamentaux, la GEAR visait un développement tourné vers l’extérieur. S’inscrivant dans la logique de la GEAR, les autorités de la Province septentrionale ont formulé une Stratégie de croissance et développement (GDS) issue essentiellement de cette macropolitique. Basant son étude de cas sur la Province septentrionale, l’article suggère que la GEAR et la GDS ont engendré un développement tourné vers l’extérieur qui est également sensible aux impératifs des forces extérieures. Selon l’auteur, l’Afrique du Sud et la province septentrionale sont tellement intégrées dans le système mondialisé qu’elles ne peuvent ni formuler ni maîtriser la mondialisation pour résoudre leurs propres problèmes de développement. Nous soulignons que cette forme de mondialisation n’a pas entraîné une meilleure satisfaction des besoins fondamentaux pour les pauvres. En conclusion, nous appelons de nos v?ux la mise en place d’une situation de développement forte qui puisse engendrer un développement centré sur lui‐même.