Short-term demographic changes in relation to economic fluctuations: The case of Tuscany during the pre-transitional period

Economic, social, and demographic quantitative analysis has paid much attention to the short-term relationship between economic (the prices of consumer goods in particular) and demographic time series. In the last few years, research in this field has further developed thanks to new and stimulating methodological approaches. With reference to the numerous studies on demographic and economic short-term variations in England, carried out after Lee (1981), Bengtsson and Reher have recently suggested the existence of a school which we may call ‘the economic history school of short-term analysis’. This school is not only characterized by its choice of problems and its sampling method but also its choice of statistical techniques (Bengtsson and Reher, 1998). The work presented here might not necessarily be included in this ‘new’ school, but it follows the same method of research in terms of the analytical techniques adopted. The area considered in this research is the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, over the time period from 1823 to 1854. The aim of this chapter is to identify how different ‘territories’, each with their own economic, social, and demographic characteristics, experienced different demographic outcomes when faced with fluctuations in wheat prices. Once the close relationship between fluctuations in wheat prices and mortality has been established, we indicate how such a link became particularly strong only in the case of specific age groups. The correspondence between prices and mortality fluctuations was not necessarily direct and was linked to economic and social factors. To disentangle this complicated ‘knot’, we first contrast the demographic reactions of the urban population with those of the rural population, and then undertake a deeper analysis of the reactions of the rural population. The rich and detailed statistical documentation produced by the Tuscan Public Records Office permits us to consider the mortality reactions of infants, children, youths, adults, and the elderly to fluctuating wheat prices in forty-three different agrarian regions. By applying the distributed lag model we have been able to explore the relationship between fluctuations in wheat prices and mortality, with reference to Tuscany in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some of the results partly reflect what was already know, but others raise new questions regarding the reaction mechanisms of a population to an agrarian crisis. In particular, the model is representative of both the urban and rural populations, when the latter is considered as a whole. Town and countryside present more similarities than differences, as regard to the various age groups. References Bengtsson, T. and Reher, D. (1998) ‘Short and Medium Term Relations between Population and Economy’, in C.-E. Núñez (ed.), Debates and Controversies in Economic History. Proceedings of the Twelfth International Economic History Congress. Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces e Fundación Fomento de la Historia Económica, pp. 99-115.