Fertility and mortality responses to short-term economic stress: Evidence from two Hungarian sample populations, 1819-1914

Demographic response to short-term price fluctuations can be interpreted as an indicator of living standards in pre-modern societies. In this paper, we demonstrate how childbearing and infant and child mortality responded to changes in rye prices in two nineteenth-century Hungarian sub-regions. We conducted a micro-level demographic analysis based on family reconstitution data and multivariate statistical methods (event history analysis). Our findings reveal that both childbearing and child mortality differed between the two regions, and that both were affected by short-term economic fluctuations, but that the responses depended strongly on local economic, demographic and socio-cultural conditions. Child mortality responded markedly to rising rye prices, but in our Central Hungarian study population with high fertility and high infant and child mortality, this response was stronger than in our West Hungarian study population with more modest child mortality and fertility. At the same time, the mortality response to changing prices increased over time in both populations as a result of local industrialization in the latter and modernization of the surrounding region in the former. An immediate and presumably deliberate fertility response of the landless to rising food prices was more characteristic of the Western study population before 1870 while it was not observed in the Central population. Our results, therefore, emphasize the similarities with evidence from other European or Asian communities, and – at the same time – the importance of local context in explaining our findings.