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Wednesday 30 March 2016 14.00 - 16.00
S-3 LAB03 Household Budgets and Living Standards during the Nineteenth- and Early-twentieth Centuries
Aula 16, Nivel 1
Networks: Economic History , Labour Chair: Elise Van Nederveen Meerkerk
Organizer: Corinne Boter Discussant: Jane Humphries
Corinne Boter : Dutch Household Incomes and Expenditures during the Transition to a Male Breadwinner Society 1880-1920
Abstract
Research on historical living standards is usually based on male real wage series while women’s and children’s contributions to the household income are often neglected. This is all the more questionable seeing that not every man was fulltime employed. During the past decades, several scholars have tried to take this ... (Show more)
Abstract
Research on historical living standards is usually based on male real wage series while women’s and children’s contributions to the household income are often neglected. This is all the more questionable seeing that not every man was fulltime employed. During the past decades, several scholars have tried to take this type of historical research one step further by first, investigating several prototypes of households while focussing on regional variation. Second, by looking at the working activities and contributions of all household members (Verdon 2002; Humphries & Sarasúa; Humphries 2013).
This paper offers new empirical evidence on household income in the Netherlands in the period 1880-1930. By analysing household budgets and estimating the value of non-monetary contributions of all household members, this paper aims to come to a better understanding of the contributions of women and children to the household income. This period is especially interesting to investigate because, according to existing literature, women and children in Western Europe withdrew from the labour market during the second half of the nineteenth century to pave the way for a ‘male breadwinner society’ (Janssens 1997; Schmidt and Van Nederveen Meerkerk 2012). This was especially true for the Netherlands where this development happened earlier and more rapidly relative to surrounding countries. Supposedly, households increasingly desired to consume non-market produced goods like cleanliness and cosiness which had to be ‘produced’ by a stay-at-home wife (De Vries 2008). I argue that women and children for long still contributed to the household income but that this is overlooked due to the use of aggregated data from official sources like censuses. Only by looking at household level information about incomes and consumption, will we be able to grasp the dynamics behind this type of social change.
In short, by analysing households’ incomes and expenditures I will first contribute to our knowledge of Dutch living standards. Second, I will add to our understanding of the origins and expansion of the male breadwinner society by giving the ‘transition phase’ special attention. How did households adapt to his new ‘ideal’? And how did this differ between various types of labour markets?

References
Humphries, Jane and Carmen Sarasúa. 2012. “Off the record: reconstructing women’s labor force participation in the European past.” Feminist Economics 18(4): 39-67.
Humphries, Jane. 2013. “The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a
critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution.” Economic History Review 66(3): 693-714.
Janssens, A. 1997. “The rise and decline of the male breadwinner family: an overview of the debate.” International Review of Social History 42(5): 1-23.
Schmidt, A. and E. van Nederveen Meerkerk. 2012. “Reconsidering The “First Male-Breadwinner Economy”: Women’s Labor Force Participation In The Netherlands, 1600-1900.” Feminist Economics 18(4): 69-96.
Verdon, N. 2002. “The rural labour market in the early nineteenth century: women’s and children’s employment, family income, and the 1834 Poor Law Report.” Economic History Review 55(2): 299-323.
Vries, J. de. 2008. The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Show less)

Luisa Muñoz Abeledo, Cristina Borderías : Engendering Family Budgets in Spain (1850-1936): Wages and Income of Men, Women and Children
As new evidence relating to female employment has emerged in recent years, a current debate is taking place regarding the role of women within the household economy and the real impact of male breadwinner model among the working-class. Based on the use of enumerators’ books, multiple labour and wages statistical ... (Show more)
As new evidence relating to female employment has emerged in recent years, a current debate is taking place regarding the role of women within the household economy and the real impact of male breadwinner model among the working-class. Based on the use of enumerators’ books, multiple labour and wages statistical data and family budgets, this paper aims to examine the labour strategies of households and changes in women's contribution to the family economy in two different Spanish labour markets (Catalan textile areas and Galicia maritime economies), both with a high demand for female labour and high female labour force participation rates. Data on the wages of every household member allow us to analyse the level and composition of family income throughout the family life cycle, so as to detect which sectors of the working class came closest to the male-breadwinner model and the conditions under which this became possible. (Show less)

Sakari Saaritsa : Children First: Intrahousehold Responses to Health Care Inequality in Pre-welfare State Finland
Children first: Intrahousehold responses to health care inequality in pre-welfare state Finland
The paper provides an analysis of intrahousehold responses to variation in ability to consume medical services in early 20th century Finland. In the pre-welfare state era, paid services dominated, while subsidized care was available through a patchwork of ... (Show more)
Children first: Intrahousehold responses to health care inequality in pre-welfare state Finland
The paper provides an analysis of intrahousehold responses to variation in ability to consume medical services in early 20th century Finland. In the pre-welfare state era, paid services dominated, while subsidized care was available through a patchwork of of fringe benefits, municipal doctors, mutuals and public hospitals with no universal coverage. Inequalities have been suggested to have followed, but no analysis of the outcome for the actual consumers has so far existed. Household budget data from the 1920s enables measuring the differences in consumption of paid and unpaid services across income levels, social groups, and types of habitat (rural / urban). Morbidity is proxied through the weight of demographic risk groups in households and seasonal variation in reported cases of contagious disease. The findings suggest that the most important subsidized services were fringe benefits from employers to white-collar employees and workers in rural industrial communities. Public services, in principle available to urban workers, were less effective.
Econometric results on household behaviour indicate that low income and low coverage led to systematic prioritization within families. Responses to indicators of elevated morbidity across groups suggest that those dependent on paid services and at the lower end of the income distribution were engaging in stricter prioritization of medical care within households than the rest. With more stringent constraints, only highest-risk moments triggered significant change in spending, while a notable part of sick spells went untreated by professionals. Comparing responses to adult and childhood diseases along the income distribution, only childhood diseases elicited a clear response among the poor, while diseases affecting adults triggered spending only among somewhat more affluent workers. Contrary to the earner or gender biases often highlighted in intrahousehold allocation literature, market dependent poor families mostly responded to objective health risks of members, but ultimately prioritized children regardless of sex, neglecting adult health. Needs and parental altruism, rather than power, apparently determined the allocation of care. (Show less)

Giovanni Vecchi : Living Standards, Inequality and Poverty around the World, 1815-2015. A New Household Budget Approach
The aim of the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) project is to rewrite the history of both inequality and poverty over the last two centuries, and to make that history international. Existing accounts perch on a narrow evidentiary base: few countries, few indicators (often proxies), short time frames, poor comparability across ... (Show more)
The aim of the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) project is to rewrite the history of both inequality and poverty over the last two centuries, and to make that history international. Existing accounts perch on a narrow evidentiary base: few countries, few indicators (often proxies), short time frames, poor comparability across sources and countries, unrepresentative groups such as the top 1 percent. A hitherto underutilized source of data, household budgets, can provide the foundation for better estimates of long-run changes in income distribution.
What is special about household budgets? If we are interested in living standards, poverty, or inequality, several possible indicators are available. Economic historians have been quite ingenious in discovering eclectic sources and devising methods to overcome the lack of ideal data. Countless papers have explored the use wage rates or annual income from tax records, for example. What’s unique about household budgets is the fact that they let us see how families responded to the economic environment. Wage data might show us that, say, factory workers were put under pressure in a certain time or place. But this would not tell us how they reacted. They might have switched consumption from meat to bread. They might have kept children out of school and put them to work, or a mother might have taken up market employment. They might have moved to a smaller house, taken in lodgers, or spent less on fuel. The head of household might have worked more days per year, possibly by taking on a secondary employment. The wage data tell us none of this. Household budgets do. It is only when we know about consumption patterns, wealth and savings, housing, labour market participation of all family members, and so on that we can fully understand a) the real impact on family welfare, and b) the strategies families used to cope. Further advantages have been discussed by Deaton (1997) and Deaton and Zaidi (2002).
The initial focus of the HHB project is the construction of a multi-topic database of household budgets from 1850 to the present day, together with associated measures of living standards. The HHB Database comprises ca. 350 variables including consumption, income and wealth, wages and retail prices, education and health, anthropometrics and fertility, employment and migration, housing, agriculture, access to credit, and exposure to shocks.
A collection of household budgets such as the HHB Database is not a statistical sample. To overcome this problem, HHB is working on three main fronts. Firstly, we are developing an innovative methodology to combine household budgets with data from population censuses using post-stratification techniques. Holt and Smith (1979) provides a viable solution, given the data typically available to economic historians. The use of flexible parametric functions has proved to work very well in protecting estimates against the oddities of 19th century empirical distributions (Cowell and Victoria-Feser 1996; Jenkins 2009 and Vecchi 2011). A second methodological front is the exploitation of histogram-style information, which is essential to long-run studies. The literature has developed a number of new techniques to fit parametric functions to grouped data (e.g. Hajargasht, Gholamreza and Griffiths 2013; Chotikapanich, Duangkamon et al. 2013; Modalsli 2014). Thirdly, the HHB project is exploring the use of recently-developed algorithms aimed at ungrouping grouped data, that is at extracting samples of synthetic households from sets of summary tables (Shorrocks and Wan 2008).
The HHB project is also engaged in systematic bibliographic research, carried out in synergy with historians, focused on identifying sources containing household budgets. Such an undertaking has been done before (Williams and Zimmerman 1935), but other compilations point to additional sources with hundreds of thousands of additional household budgets. (Show less)



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