South Australia’s Employment Relief Program for Assisted Immigrants: Promises and Reality, 1838-1843

Edwyna Harris () and Sumner La Croix
Additional contact information
Edwyna Harris: Monash University

No 202008, Working Papers from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics

Abstract: Great Britain established the new colony of South Australia (SA) in 1834. The immigration contract signed by assisted migrants required the SA government to provide those who could not find private sector work with employment on public works. We use new data on the compensation of unemployed and private-sector workers to examine how the SA unemployment system functioned before and after the onset of a major economic crisis in August 1840. We conclude that the unemployment system provided highly compensated relief employment to a small number of migrants prior to the crisis but as migrant numbers claiming relief employment soared between August 1840 and October 1841, the government drastically cut compensation for relief employment. The cuts occurred in tandem with the government’s release of newly surveyed rural lands, which together provided incentives and opportunities for workers to move to rural areas to seek work on newly opened farms. A comparison of the SA employment relief program with the 1843 temporary employment relief program established in the neighboring colony of New South Wales (NSW) shows that the NSW program neither established guarantees of jobs for assisted migrants unable to find work nor provided jobs for all assisted migrants without work during the 1843-1845 period.

Keywords: relief; unemployed; South Australia; migrants; public works (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J38 J65 N37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-his, nep-lma and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics.hawaii.edu/research/workingpapers/WP_20-08.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hai:wpaper:202008

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.economics ... esearch/working.html

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Web Technician ().