Tommy Bengtsson

• Lund University

The enclosure reforms in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western Europe consolidated dispersed landholdings and privatized common land in order to expand food production. However, evaluations of the effects of enclosure reforms vary, and so far, there has been little causal evidence confirming their positive economic impact. We estimate the causa...

New estimates of economic flows by age combined with population projections show that in the coming decades (1) global GDP growth could be slower by about 1 percentage point per year, declining more sharply than population growth; (2) GDP will shift toward sub‐Saharan Africa more than population trends suggest; (3) living standards of working‐age a...

The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) at the Centre for Economic Demography (CED), Lund University was built to answer questions derived from previous research using macro data from 1749 onwards. It includes longitudinal micro data for a regional sample of rural, semi-urban, and urban parishes in southern Sweden from 1646 to 1968 for app...

Across today’s developed world, there is a clear mortality gradient by socioeconomic status for all ages. It is often taken for granted that this gradient was as strong—or even stronger—in the past when social transfers were rudimentary and health care systems were less developed. Some studies based on cross-sectional data have supported this view,...

The 1918 influenza pandemic had not only a massive instant death toll but also lasting effects on its survivors. Several studies have shown that children born in 1919, and thus exposed to the H1N1 virus in utero, experienced worse health and socioeconomic outcomes in older ages than surrounding birth cohorts. This study combines several sources of...

This study explores the impact an exogenous improvement in childhood health has on later-life outcomes. Using extensive and detailed register data from the Swedish Interdisciplinary Panel covering up to 2011, we follow individuals exposed to the introduction of the first vaccine against polio in Sweden (birth cohorts 1937–1966) until adulthood in o...

There are three reasons why we must look far back in time when predicting future mortality trends. Firstly, the mortality decline that we can observe today has its roots in improvements achieved long ago in living standards and diet, public health institutions, medicine, and other areas relevant to the physical well-being of the population. Speakin...

This open access book describes methods of mortality forecasting and discusses possible improvements. It contains a selection of previously unpublished and published papers, which together provide a state-of-the-art overview of statistical approaches as well as behavioural and biological perspectives. The different parts of the book provide discuss...

Improvements in human stature, real income and life expectancy have taken place at an unprecedented speed during the last 200 years. In the case of life expectancy at birth, the record has been broken at an amazingly constant pace since 1840. Females have continuously gained 2.92 months per year, males slightly less (Oeppen and Vaupel 2002). While...

Kermack et al. (1934) proposed the cohort explanation in their analysis of the aggregated mortality decline in England, Wales, Scotland, and Sweden. Their conclusion was that reductions in the death rates of the various age groups attained at any particular time depended primarily on the individuals’ date of birth, and only indirectly on the partic...

Population ageing is making it increasingly difficult for countries to sustain their current levels social welfare transfers from the economically active population to the dependent elderly. To meet this challenge, the Swedish government has implemented various reforms since the 1990s aimed at reducing incentives to take early retirement. However,...

The current Swedish pension system is flexible. Workers may choose to retire, partially or fully, at any time after the age of 61, while still working full or part-time. The system also allows retirees to temporarily stop collecting pension benefits and return to employment, but they have no right to continue working after the age of 67. Like in ma...

There is no consensus in the literature about the role of socioeconomic factors on influenza mortality during the 1918 pandemic. While some scholars have found that social factors were important, others have not. In this study, we analyzed differences in excess mortality by social class in Sweden during the 1918 pandemic. We analyzed individual-lev...

This paper considers the long-term effects of smoking on disability retirement in Sweden. Smoking is known to have damaging effects on health, but there is limited evidence on how the effects of smoking translate into worse labour market outcomes, such as the inability to work. In contrast to the few previous studies on smoking and disability retir...

We examine economic inequality and social differences in infant and child mortality, and fertility responses to food price changes in North Orkney, 1855–1910, using linked vital records. This small population featured a diverse occupational structure, limited land resources, and geographic isolation from mainland Scotland. Segments of Orkney’s non-...

Background: Child mortality differed greatly within rural regions in Europe before and during the mortality transition. Little is known about the role of nutrition in such geographic differences, and about the factors affecting the nutritional status and hence the disease outcomes. Objective: Focusing on nutrition, we analyse the effects of soil t...

This paper investigates whether the Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) scheme prolongs working life. The evidence from the 1994 Swedish pension reform shows a gender and socio-economic gradient in the labor supply responses to phasing in NDC. While the reform exerted a large and significant positive effect on the average retirement age among highl...

Studies in historical demography aim at finding relationships between living conditions and demographic variables (fertility, mortality, etc.). To include the geographic conditions into these studies it is required to geocode the population and quantify the geographic context. In an ongoing project at Lund University, Sweden 57,000 individuals from...

The mean age at retirement in Sweden increased roughly one month per year between 2000 and 2011 (Karlsson and Olsson, 2012). Empirical studies mostly relate this increase to eligibility requirement changes in the Swedish disability pension, which became increasingly stringent during the 1990s. Few, however, have attributed this increase to the 1994...

Sweden, like many OECD countries, has witnessed a reversal of old-age labor sup-ply, from a trend toward early retirement to a steady increase in the age at labor market exit. This change is widely believed to be a consequence of pension reforms in the 1990s, which increased the stringency of eligibility for disability insurance,while providing fin...

Fighting infectious disease in the past, much like today, focused on isolating the disease and thereby stopping its spread. New insights into the modes of transmission and the causal agents in the mid-nineteenth century, together with fear of new epidemic outbreaks, motivated public investments aimed at reducing mortality from infectious disease. C...

The mean age at retirement in Sweden increased roughly one month per year between 2000 and 2011 (Karlsson and Olsson, 2012). Empirical studies mostly relate this increase to eligibility requirement changes in the Swedish disability pension, which became increasingly stringent during the 1990s. Few, however, have attributed this increase to the 1994...

BACKGROUND Mortality differed greatly within rural regions in Europe before and during the mortality decline. Knowledge is lacking on to what extent these differences can be explained by the distribution of factors affecting the exposure to virulent diseases and the nutritional status of individuals and hence their resistance to diseases. OBJECTIVE...

The timing of the great mortality decline was strikingly similar in the countries of Western and Northern Europe, despite differences in their individual economic structure and development. The decline started in the middle of the eighteenth century, became more pronounced around AD 1800, and then continued. The history of mortality decline in Nort...

This chapter examines the role of economic factors in first marriage in seven locations in pre-industrial Europe and Asia using a two-generation theory, which also takes socioeconomic class into account. In these settings, the household provided a major welfare function for its members. Access to land was of considerable importance, but so was the...

A study of marriage in preindustrial Europe and Asia that goes beyond the Malthusian East–West dichotomy to find variation within regions and commonality across regions. Since Malthus, an East–West dichotomy has been used to characterize marriage behavior in Asia and Europe. Marriages in Asia were said to be early and universal, in Europe late and...

Background: We know a great deal about the historical fertility transition at the macro level. The dominating focus on the macro level in previous research on the fertility transition means, however, that to a large extent we lack knowledge about details of the decline and empirical tests of the leading explanatory frameworks. Objective: Our aim is...

In the early postwar period, improvements in life expectancy in many Western countries made health authorities, health scientists and politicians believe that social differences in mortality converged. The assumption was that inequality, when measured as death rates, was on steady decline, possibly even on the brink of disappearing. The question is...

This paper deals with socioeconomic differences in adult mortality in southern Sweden 1815-1968, a period of transformation from an agricultural to a modern industrial society and increasing life expectancy. We use longitudinal micro-level data with information on demographic events, household structure and socioeconomic status. The main finding is...

Population Aging and the Future of the Welfare State: The Example of Sweden TO M M Y BE N G T S S O N KI R K SC O T T Sweden was the world leader in population aging for a good portion of the twentieth century. During that century, the share of the elderly doubled in Sweden, with 18 percent aged 65 years and older in year 2000. While no longer at...

Most microlevel studies in the social sciences have focused on the impact of different measured variables. While some studies have also dealt with unobserved variation, it has usually only been controlled for to perfect the estimates of the observables. In this article, the authors applied a modified version of a recently developed method designed...

Population ageing, the shift in age distribution towards older ages, is of immense global concern. It is taking place to a varying degree all over the world, more in Europe and some Asian countries, less on the African continent. The worldwide share of people aged 65 years and above is predicted to increase from 7.5% in 2005 to 16.1% in 2050 (UN 20...

This book is the first to take a comprehensive view of the challenges that population ageing present in the near future taking Sweden as the case. Can the increasing number of retirees per worker be stopped by immigration or increasing fertility or will we need to increase pension age instead? Cost for the social-care system is readily increasing;...

Population ageing is a global phenomenon, but it began earlier in Europe than in the rest of the world. By 2000, the share of the European population above 65 years was 17 percent – a share that the global population is calculated to reach around 2050. Until recently, the increasing share of the elderly has been compensated for by a declining share...

Previous research has shown that the disease load experienced during the birth year, measured as the infant mortality rate, had a significant influence on old-age mortality in nineteenth-century rural Sweden. We know that children born in years with very high rates of infant mortality, due to outbreaks of smallpox or whooping cough, and who still s...

This study charts the differences between the sickness absence of immigrants and Swedes during a period when a flourishing labour market in the beginning of the 1990s turned into a tense and problematic one. We consider not only human capital factors for various immigrant groups and natives, but also workplace conditions and macro level factors. Us...

This essay explores the role played by inheritance on human longevity. We estimate a model of overall mortality among married persons aged 50 years and above taking genetic as well as socioeconomic and environmental factors into account. We consider whether these factors have temporary or long-lasting effects on health. The demographic and economic...

This paper deals with socioeconomic differences in mortality among infants, children, adults, and elderly during the period of mortality decline in the nineteenth century. It uses multilevel Cox regression controlling for shared unobserved factors at the family level, and also compares the magnitude of the observed differences between socioeconomic...

The historical demographic study of family structure and kinship has experienced tremendous change over the last 20 years. While the focus in the past has been on the family and the household, including coresident kin, considerable resources have recently been devoted to delineating nonresident kin. This has been done not only in societies where ki...

What is the influence of family and kinship networks on fertility, marriage, migration and mortality? Population scientists have studied the relationship between families, both immediate and extended, and demographic behavior for many years. This volume highlights the convergence of research by a group of demographers, economic historians, historia...

In this article, we analyze fertility control in a rural population characterized by natural fertility, using survival analysis on a longitudinal data set at the individual level combined with food prices. Landless and semilandless families responded strongly to short-term economic stress stemming from changes in prices. The fertility response, bot...

This study identifies factors influencing the differences in utilization of sickness benefits between immigrants and natives in Sweden. The main conclusion is that the differences in consumption of sickness benefits between foreign born and Swedes, as well as between various immigrant groups are large and persist after accounting for standard human...

The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. Why did Europe experience industrialization and modern economic growth before China, India, or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic history and one that has provoked intense debate. The established view,...

The main concern of this book is to determine when the gap in living standards between the East and the West emerged. Why did Europe experience industrialization and modern economic growth before China, India, or Japan? This is one of the most fundamental questions in Economic history and one that has provoked intense debate. The established view,...

Developed countries, especially in Europe, face a number of issue related to migration: social and economic disruptions caused by the declining demand for unskilled labour and resulting unemployment, a shortage of skilled labour in many professions, increasing international competition for highly qualified human capital, radical demographic changes...

The importance of early life conditions and current conditions for mortality in later life was assessed using historical data from four rural parishes in southern Sweden. Both demographic and economic data are valid. Longitudinal demographic and socioeconomic data for individuals and household socioeconomic data from parish registers were combined...

A pioneering work in comparative history and social science that compares population behavior in response to adversity in Europe and Asia. This highly original book—the first in a series analyzing historical population behavior in Europe and Asia—pioneers a new approach to the comparative analysis of societies in the past. Using techniques of event...

Paper in progress, please do not quote without authors consent.

Paper for session 53 "The demographic transition and human capital: comparative perspectives of the developed and the developing world" at the 13 th Congress of the International Economic History Association, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 22-26 July 2002.

Paper for session 87 (Demographic responses to economic stress in pre-industrial Europe and Asia: A micro approach) at the 13 th Congress of the International Economic History Association, Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 2002.

The importance of early life conditions and current conditions for mortality in later life was assessed using historical data from four rural parishes in southern Sweden. Longitudinal demographic and socio-economic data for individuals, and household socio-economic data from parish registers were combined with community data on food costs and disea...

This paper assesses the importance of early-life conditions relative to the prevailing conditions for mortality by cause of death in later life using historical data for four rural parishes in southern Sweden for which both demographic and economic data are very good. Longitudinal demographic data for individuals are combined with household socio-e...

Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population has for the past two centuries been a constant source of inspiration and debate for scholars working on relationships between population and economy in historical perspective. This book of collected essays-an outcome of an A-session held at the 12th International Congress of Economic History in Madrid,...

Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population has for the past two centuries been a constant source of inspiration and debate for scholars working on relationships between population and economy in historical perspective. This book of collected essays-an outcome of an A-session held at the 12th International Congress of Economic History in Madrid,...

By using macro-economic time series as time-varying community variables in a life event analysis framework for micro data on individuals, we have found that mortality among children over the age of one year in pre-industrial Sweden was directly dependent upon economic fluctuations, a fact which has not been demonstrated before. The impact is strong...

Public pension schemes are by far the most important means in industrialized societies of distributing income and consumption throughout a lifetime, and of providing for old age when the ability to work is low or non-existent. Other chapters deal primarily with the question of how different pension systems will be affected by those demographic chan...

Contributors: Partha Dasgupta, C. S. Holling, Robert Fogel, Geoffrey McNicoll, Caroline Bledsoe, Robert Willis, Amartya Sen, Nancy Birdsall Global population increase and production and consumption patterns and levels make the crucial issues first raised by Malthus two hundred years ago more important than ever. The debate today is characterized by...

Using a mixture of economic and demographic analysis, this book studies the changing patterns of family formation over the last twenty years. A strength of the book is the data and analysis included on Japan and Western countries, which have previously been less researched than the developing world. The first part explores the effects of economic c...

The mortality decline in the Nordic countries started at the end of the 18th century with a decrease in infant and child mortality. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that adult mortality started to fall. Recent research shows that improvements in nutrient supply, medical care, sanitation and nursing, did not take place until the begin...

The theory of the demographic transition was long regarded as one of the most firmly-established of socio-economic theories. This theory was thought to explain how mortality and fertility were changed through the improvements in living standards and new labour conditions that followed the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth ce...

The mortality decline in the Nordic countries started at the end of the 18th century with a decrease in infant and child mortality. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that adult mortality started to fall. Recent research shows that improvements in nutrient supply, medical care, sanitation and nursing did not take place until the beginn...

It is generally considered that mobility is increasing in our society. Internationalisation is growing; travel is increasing; impulses, trends and new ideas from outside gain a more rapid foothold; distances diminish. At the same time, however, local ties are strengthening their hold in the sense that long-distance migratory movements are diminishi...

The Swedish welfare model of the 1960s and 1970s excited great interest among many other countries. Today it still is an ideal image for some but a warning for many others. The reason why opinion about the Swedish welfare model has changed is primarily Sweden’s financial problems, which are associated with a badly financed and excessively large pub...

Tommy Bengtsson The Swedish welfare model of the 1960s and 1970s excited great interest among many other countries. Today it still is an ideal image for some but a warning for many others. The reason why opinion about the Swedish welfare model has changed is primarily Sweden's financial problems, which are associated with a badly financed and exces...

Internal migration patterns in Sweden and the propensity to migrate during the period from 1961 to 1988 are analyzed and compared. The author finds that "significant shifts between different age groups have occurred. However, no generation effect (link between the size of birth groups and migration intensity) can be detected. What seems to be the c...

RÉSUMÉ Dans une perspective « générationnelle », la propension à migrer entre les comtés suédois a été loin d'être stable au cours de la période 1961-1980. Entre les groupes d'âge, des changements importants se sont produits. Cependant, aucun effet de génération (aucun lien entre la taille des cohortes de naissance et l'intensité migratoire) n'a pu...

During the second half of the 19th century the urban share of the Swedish population increased from 10% to well over 20%. A large part of the increase was due to population growth in Stockholm, but most towns grew rapidly. This rapid urbanization took place during the period of industrial breakthrough in Sweden. During the early 19th century the gr...

The response of mortality to short-term changes in real wages is analyzed here not just in its own right but more particularly as an indicator of long-term shifts in the general standard of living. It is hypothesized that the response would have been stronger the lower the standard of living. The relationship between age-specific mortality levels a...

In 1900 the share of agricultural population in the total population was slightly over 50 per cent. In one county the share was still more than 70 per cent and in three others about 40 per cent.