On Historical Household Budgets

Abstract

The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries. If one knows where to look, historical family budgets are more abundant than might be suspected. And statistical techniques have been developed to handle the associated problems of small, incomplete, and unrepresentative samples. We introduce the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, aimed at gathering data and sources, but also at creating an informational infrastructure that provides i) reliable storage and easy access to historical family budget data, along with ii) tools to configure the data as it is entered so as to harmonise it with present-day surveys.

Household leverage and consumption during the Great Depression

“…It would be interesting, if future research projects could perform similar analyses for other countries during the Great Depression, as well as for Denmark and other countries in various historical time periods without banking crises. Recently, an ambitious international research project on historical household budgets was launched with the aim of exploring the evolution of living standards and inequality over the past two centuries (A’Hearn et al , 2016). It is part of the project plan to establish a database with micro data from historical household budget surveys from a large range of countries.…”

Happy 150th Anniversary, Italy?: Institutions and Economic Performance Since 1861

“…Secondly because, as suggested by a recent contribution, lower investment in education could be also a product of the lack of willingness. 57 Following the Engerman and Sokoloff hypothesis, 58 This led to a significant delay in the process of literacy of the South; still in 1911 the literacy rate of the southern regions was 40.3%, while in the Northern and Central regions had overcome the threshold of 80%. It was only with the development of centralised state-financed education in 1911 that the trend changed.…”