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We develop a simple Malthusian growth model with continuous productivity growth and derive the stationary steady-state equilibrium. We show that linearisation around the steady-state gives an empirically tractable model of Malthusian wage and population behaviour using the familiar concept of β-convergence. Our empirical strategy addresses the concern in the literature over model identification and inconsistent parameter estimates. Based on newly constructed population data, we estimate wage and population growth models using panel data for up to 17 countries from 900CE to 1870CE. Our results provide the first time-series evidence of a strong Malthusian trap that was pervasive across countries and time before the 19th century industrial revolution.

Was the Roman world caught in a Malthusian trap? In this survey, I draw on a wide range of evidence – from archeological data to city size estimates – to argue that Malthusian constraints were not binding over long periods. Market-size effects allowed the Roman economy to grow substantially in per capita terms, despite population growth. I place these observations in the context of recent debates and contributions by both ancient historians and – for the long run – by economists.

Recent literature on developing countries has revived interest in structural change involving the reallocation of resources from agriculture to industry. Here, we focus on the first such historically important structural transformation in which some parts of Europe escaped from the Malthusian trap centuries earlier than the Industrial Revolution, while others stagnated. There is as yet no consensus as to the causes of this First Great Divergence. The paper advances the thesis that what lies at the root of different paths is the type of property rights inherited. As populations everywhere in Europe recovered from the catastrophes of the late medieval period, what mattered for the direction taken was the size of the landlord class and their landholdings. In Western Europe where peasant proprietors tilled small plots, increases in population levels led to lower real wages. Given the low incomes of landlords and peasants, demand for manufactured goods remained low. At the other extreme, in eastern Europe, second serfdom kept wages low, and rents high. Yet given the small size of the land-owning class, these rents could not generate enough demand for high-end manufacturing processes either. Northwestern Europe, being in the middle in terms both of the size of the landholding classes and their properties, prospered as wages failed to decline even when population levels rapidly rose. Combined demand from landlords and workers kindled an expansion of the manufacturing sector.

In the 1950s the University of Durham was involved in a number of separate externally-funded projects that were aimed at assessing Malta's potential for development after it became independent from the United Kingdom. Following a pilot study, a group led by W.B. Fisher of the Department of Geography together with a team from the University of Malta, obtained what at the time were substantial funds from the Colonial Office's Colonial Economic Research Committee (CERC). Concurrently K.C. Dunham, Head of the Department of Geology, successfully obtained support from British Petroleum to carry out a geological survey, while a soil survey was separately commissioned. As well as marking the first of what was to become an established tradition of applied development projects in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, the Durham Geography Department also used its growing profile of external funding to stimulate an expansion of both its teaching and its research, so as to become one of the largest departments in the United Kingdom. Reflecting the zeitgeist of the time, Fisher and his colleagues viewed applied research, not only as an academic exercise but also as a route to human betterment, and perceived the researchers' task as providing information and policy options upon which decisions makers may formulate policy. They eschewed any attempt to fully consider different development strategies. However, some younger researchers in their later outputs and doctoral theses adopted a more critical approach about the options for Malta's future. The principal issue raised by Durham team was a concern that post-independence Malta was facing a Malthusian trap in which the islands would not have a sufficiently productive resource base to support its growing population. Over the past six decades the trap has been avoided because of a growing economy, but today pressures of people on resources are once more acute and a case is made for a second land-use survey.

SummaryGreen Revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. However conditions have changed since the well-documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefitted smallholders in southern Asia and beyond. We argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial for pro-poor impacts. To critically analyze Rwanda’s Green Revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective, a mixed methods, multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western Rwanda. Here Malthusian policy framing has been used to justify imposed rather than “induced innovation”. The policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties, inputs, and credit in order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income. Although policies have been deemed successful in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period, such trends were found to be quite incongruous with local experiences. Disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Negative impacts were evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted, poverty exacerbated, local systems of knowledge, trade, and labor were impaired, and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed. In order to mitigate the effects we recommend that inventive pro-poor forms of tenure and cooperation (none of which preclude improvements to input availability, market linkages, and infrastructure) may provide positive outcomes for rural people, and importantly in Rwanda, for those who have become landless in recent years. We conclude that policies promoting a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa should not all be considered to be pro-poor or even to be of a similar type, but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment. Such assessment should be based not only on consistent, objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure, agricultural practices, and the wellbeing of socially differentiated people.

The main achievement of this paper is to introduce a new construction of population data for the territory within the current borders of Turkey. The broad coverage of the reconstruction includes the population in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. I also provide entirely new population estimates for specifc years in previous five centuries. This contributes to the literature since it allows to provide new estimates supporting the existence of a Malthusian cycle. In the paper, I first summarize the economic history of the Ottoman Empire. Second, I explain how I construct population estimates for the territory of interest for the specific years. I also compare my population estimates to those of other historians. The end result is twofold: First, the demographic features of the Empire generally support the Malthusian view, and, second, the Turkish economy leaves its Malthusian trap in the late 19th century.

Is there a shortage of CAs(SA) in South Africa as frequently claimed? An analysis of the membership records of SAICA and the real fixed salaries offered to newly qualified CAs(SA) indicate a likely oversupply.

Malthus [Malthus, Thomas, [1798] 1970. An Essay On The Principle Of Population. Penguin, New York.] believed that population growth will eventually lead to natural resource depletion, economic and social collapse and population decline. Brander and Taylor [Brander, James A., Taylor, M. Scott, 1998. The simple economics of Easter Island: a Ricardo-Malthus model of renewable resource use. American Economic Review 88, 119–138] use a predator–prey model with an assumption of an open access resource. They show that the collapse of Easter Island could be explained by a Malthusian trap combined with technical characteristics of the resources. They suggest that institutional change such as assignment of property rights could potentially have averted the collapse of Easter Island. In this paper, we show that even if the islanders had complete assignment of property rights and implemented optimal resource management with infinite horizon, or equivalently had a social planner that implemented such an optimal plan, as in neoclassical welfare economics, a similar boom-bust cycle would have occurred.

The rise of China is no doubt the most important event in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. The institutional theory of development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions cannot explain China's rise. This article argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental flaws of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Latin America's lost decade and plagued debt crisis, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.

Two standard solutions for the ‘Malthusian Trap’ involve institutional reforms and technological progress. Using Easter Island as an example, we investigate the hypothetical role that technological progress and population management reform might have played in preventing the collapse of the island’s civilization. The model includes a composite manufactured good and a composite harvested renewable resource. Fertility is assumed to rise with per capita income. The resource’s carrying capacity and intrinsic growth rate as well as labor’s harvesting productivity are subject to technological progress. Fertility is subject to population management reform. The model yields a system of two simultaneous, nonlinear, non-autonomous differential equations. We first study the system’s steady states. The system is then parameterized for Easter Island and its comparative dynamics are investigated in simulations. We find that technological progress can generate large fluctuations in population, renewable resources, and per capita utility, sometimes resulting in system collapse. With high fertility rates, the population and the resource vanish. None of the simulations investigated here exhibit a constantly growing per capita utility over time. Finally, we evaluate the applicability of these results to contemporary societies. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

In the process of economic development economies grow through various regimes, each characterized by different demographic-economic interactions. The changes in these interactions are key elements in different explanations of the escape from Malthusian stagnation. We employ time-varying vector autoregressions, an approach that allows tracking this transition for England in the period between 1541 and 1870. The empirical findings suggest that the link between real wages and population growth was at work until the 19th century. Furthermore, we document changes in the propagation mechanism from real wages on population growth over time that feature prominently in Unified Growth Theory. Most remarkably, in contrast to earlier empirical literature we find strong effects of income on mortality after the 1750s.

The goal of this paper is to offer a non-technical interpretation of the “Great Divergence” and “Great Convergence” stories. After reviewing existing explanations in the literature, I offer a different interpretation. Western countries exited the Malthusian trap by destroying traditional institutions, which was associated with an increase in income inequality and even a decrease in life expectancy, but allowed the redistribution of income in favor of savings and investment at the expense of consumption. When the same pattern was imposed on some developing countries (colonialism – Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Latin America (LA), and the Former Soviet Union (FSU)), it resulted in the destruction of traditional institutions, increase in income inequality, and worsening of starting positions for catch-up development. Other developing countries (East Asia (EA), South Asia (SA), and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA countries)) that were less affected by colonialism and managed to retain traditional institutions by the end of the twentieth century found themselves in a better starting position for modern economic growth. The slow-going technical progress finally allowed them to find another exit from the Malthusian trap – increased income that permitted the share of investment in GDP to rise without a major increase in income inequality or decrease in life expectancy. The roots of the impressive long-term performance of China lie in the exceptional continuity of the Chinese civilization – the oldest in the world – that managed to preserve its uniqueness and traditions without major interruptions. It is argued that institutional continuity (East Asia, India, and MENA) is more conducive to growth than attempts to replace existing institutions by allegedly more advanced institutions imported from abroad (Latin America, FSU, and SSA). Like Russia in 1917, China re-established collectivist institutions in 1949 as a response to the failure of Westernization. Unlike Russia after 1991, China in 1979-2009 managed to preserve “Asian values” institutions – priority of community interests over the interests of the individual. However, the rapid increase in income inequality since 1985 could be a sign of weakening of collectivist institutions, which is the single most important threat to the continuation of fast economic growth.

This paper describes a two-sector demo-economic model (agricultural and non-agricultural sectors) applied to Europe and spanning the period from the neolithic agricultural revolution to the Industrial Revolution. The model describes the "incessant contest" between population growth and food production. As long as per capita agricultural output is above a critical minimum, the population is assumed to grow at a constant rate. When this output drops below the minimum, the population is subjected to random mortality "shocks" which lower the population until the production grows above the minimum. Society is thus in a "Malthusian trap". The average magnitude of the mortality crises is assumed to decrease as capital increases, which captures an increased "resistance" that comes with increased knowledge and technology. The slow accumulation of capital thus diminishes the severity of the mortality shocks; as a result both the population of the non-agricultural sector and capital grow sufficiently to bring about a permanent escape from the Malthusian trap, i.e. the Industrial Revolution.