IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bwp/bwppap/5608.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Social Security as a Developmental Institution? Extending the Solar Case for the Relative Efficacy of Poor Relief Provisions under the English Old Poor Law

Author

Listed:
  • Richard M. Smith

Abstract

This paper assesses various issues concerning the operation of the English Old Poor from 1600 to 1834 that are presented as facilitating economic growth. It identifies those factors contributing to the efficacy of welfare provisioning by reference to problems that are frequently identified: the free-rider problem, risk covariance, adverse selection and information elicitation. The entitlement to relief through an individual’s possession of a legal settlement in a parish thereby guaranteeing poor relief is seen as a key factor enabling risk-reduced labour migration and especially migration from the rural to urban sector, as well as minimisation of the free-rider problem as far as taxpayer willingness to furnish welfare funds were concerned. The extent to which welfare was generated in the agrarian sector and provided in the households of rural communities, and the minimal use of townbased ‘indoor institutions’ for welfare delivery, are seen as a key factors supporting rural household economies. These factors limited refugee flows from country to town, with positive epidemiological advantages, and enabled, by pre-industrial standards, modest levels of infant and child mortality, which also made it possible for fertility change to be the major force driving demographic change.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard M. Smith, 2008. "Social Security as a Developmental Institution? Extending the Solar Case for the Relative Efficacy of Poor Relief Provisions under the English Old Poor Law," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series 5608, GDI, The University of Manchester.
  • Handle: RePEc:bwp:bwppap:5608
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/gdi/publications/workingpapers/bwpi/bwpi-wp-5608.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Morgan Kelly & Cormac Ó Gráda, 2014. "Living standards and mortality since the middle ages," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 67(2), pages 358-381, May.
    2. Greif, Avner & Iyigun, Murat, 2013. "What Did the Old Poor Law Really Accomplish? A Redux," IZA Discussion Papers 7398, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Arjan de Haan, 2013. "The Social Policies of Emerging Economies: Growth and Welfare in China and India," Working Papers 110, International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bwp:bwppap:5608. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Rowena Harding (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wpmanuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.