Economic-Demographic Interactions in Long-Run Growth

Cliometrics confirms that Malthus’s model of the preindustrial economy, in which increases in productivity raise population but higher population drives down wages, is a good description for much of demographic-economic history. A contributor to the Malthusian equilibrium was the Western European marriage pattern, the late age of female first marriage, which promised to retard the fall of living standards by restricting fertility. The demographic transition and the transition from Malthusian economies to modern economic growth attracted many cliometric models surveyed here. A popular model component is that lower levels of mortality over many centuries increased the returns to, or preference for, human capital investment so that technical progress eventually accelerated. This initially boosted birth rates and population growth accelerated. Fertility decline was earliest and most striking in late-eighteenth-century France. By the 1830s, the fall in French marital fertility is consistent with a response to the rising opportunity cost of children. The rest of Europe did not begin to follow until the end of the nineteenth century. Interactions between the economy and migration have been modeled with cliometric structures closely related to those of natural increase and the economy. Wages were driven up by emigration from Europe and reduced in the economies receiving immigrants.