Famines and mortality crises in 18th to 19th century southern Sweden

• Published in: Genus Vol. 67; no. 2; pp. 119 - 139
• Main Authors: Bengtsson, Tommy, Broström, Göran
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” 2011
• Subjects: Death; Demographic economics; Demography; Developing countries; Economic crises; Economic fluctuations; Economic History; Economics and Business; Ekonomi och näringsliv; Ekonomisk historia; Famine; Food prices; International law; Life tables; Mortality; Parents; Samhällsvetenskap; Social Sciences; Socioeconomics; Sweden
• ISSN: 0016-6987; 2035-5556; 2035-5556
• DOI: 10.4402/genus-364

Causality is an important but complicated issue, not only within social sciences in general but also within economic and historical demography. Here we are dealing with two different, but related, problems of causality. The first is to what extent the impact of food prices on mortality is biased whenselectingon years with mortality crises. The second concerns the problem of mixing factors thatdirectlyandindirectlyhave an impact on mortality. Dealing with the first problem, we compare the effects of food prices on child and adult mortality when selecting on mortality crises with a standard approach without selection. When dealing with the second problem we use theadditive hazards model, in combination withdynamic path analysis, which allows for investigating the mediating effect of intermediate covariates in a causal framework. We use individual level data from the Scanian Economic Demographic Database for five rural parishes for the period 1766 to 1865. Data on food prices refers to the local area of these parishes. The statistical analyses are performed in the R statistical computing environment, especially with the aid of the packageeha. The main findings are that selecting on mortality crises created a large bias in the direction of overestimating the impact of food prices and that that thedirecteffects of food prices are dominating.