Labour Productivity in English Agriculture, 1850-1914: Some Quantitative Evidence on Regional Differences.

The article comments on a paper by economist E.H. Hunt related to the agricultural labor productivity in rural England from 1850 to 1914. Hunt has advanced the intriguing idea that well into the present century large areas of rural England continued to manifest many of the features typical of economically underdeveloped agrarian societies. In the paper, Hunt begins by suggesting that the appearance during the nineteenth century of a persisting pattern of inter-regional agricultural wage-rate differences within England did not lead to corresponding regional variations in unit farm labour costs. While wage rates in the south-eastern and East Anglian counties remained below those prevailing in the northerly districts, this is held to have conveyed no advantage to the conduct of agriculture in the cheap labour areas, because lower wages were merely the counterpart of lower output per worker there. Lacking comprehensive statistical measures of regional average labour productivity in agriculture to support this contention, Hunt found it necessary to fall back upon such qualitative indications as are supplied in the reports of various Royal Commissions dealing with nineteenth-century agrarian problems.