The End of Destitution

Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell

No 4295, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The paper presents a statistical generalisation, to working families in the whole of Britain, of Rowntree's finding that absolute poverty declined dramatically in York between 1899 and 1936. We use poverty lines devised by contemporary social investigators and two relatively newly-discovered data sets. We estimate an almost complete elimination of absolute poverty among working households for the whole of the Britain between 1904 and 1937. We offer a number of pieces of corroborative evidence that give support to our findings. We decompose the poverty reduction into the effects of two proximate causes, of roughly equal importance, the decline in family size and the rise of real wages. We conclude with some speculation about the deeper causes of the decline.

Keywords: Britain; living standards; real wage growth; demographic change; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N3 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2009-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published as' The end of destitution: evidence from urban British working households, 1904-37' in: Oxford Economic Papers, 2012, 64 (1), 80-102

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