Economic-Demographic Interactions in European Long-Run Growth

This review uses Malthus’ model of the preindustrial economy to structure the cliometric literature on the interaction of European population with the economy. Increases in wages raise population, and higher population drives down wages. Positive and preventive checks determine long-run population and wages. The Black Death was a positive check, eliminating a large proportion of the population across medieval Europe and temporarily boosting wages. England largely eliminated positive checks (such as famine) by the mid-seventeenth century. The economy was already on the path to sustained economic growth, despite average real wages not rising until after 1800. In eighteenth-century Sweden however, higher food grain prices raised mortality. A major preventive check was the female late age at marriage and high celibacy rate after 1500 or earlier in Western and Southern Europe. This arrangement provided a floor to living standards by restricting fertility and encouraging physical and human capital accumulation and therefore technical progress. Lower mortality rates were achieved in the west than in the east of Europe and were associated with lower fertility across the continent. Even so, population expanded most rapidly in the western, more dynamic European economies, so fertility restriction alone was not obviously the trigger for economic growth. French marital fertility control began at the end of the eighteenth century, yet French living standards were not the highest in Europe. Other European populations increased rapidly for perhaps a century before fertility fell, under pressure from rising child costs including the greater opportunity cost of time spent bringing up children. Interactions between the economy and migration, mainly focused on the long nineteenth century, have been modeled with cliometric structures related to those of natural increase and the economy. European wages were driven up by emigration from Europe and reduced in the economies receiving immigrants.