EKH Makromackan seminarium - Erik Bengtsson

Erik Bengtsson, universitetslektor vid Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen, kommer tisdag 10 mars presentera studien "The European Grain Invasion and the Swedish Economy" i Makromackan-seminariet.

Erik Bengtssons hemsida -- lu.se

Abstract:

In the 1880s European markets were flooded by cheap grains from the Americas and Russia, facilitated by new means of transportation. This was a chock to established European grain producers; in Sweden, the wheat and rye price fell by about 25 percent from its 1880 level to the 1880s and 1890s. This paper investigates the implications of the grain shock on Swedish economic restructuring. Employing an event study analysis where rural districts (N=246) are sorted by their pre-shock (1880) grain dependence, the results indicate that the more grain-dependent districts of 1880 suffered a greater population decline than comparable districts, by 6–8 percent to 1907. The results are robust to (but the coefficents decline to about 4 percent) controlling for distance to cities or harbours, population density, wealth per capita, and wealth inequality. In a further exploration, I estimate the implications of grain depndence for various parts of the population decline – fertility, domestic migration, and emigration – separately. The adjustment to the grain invasion appears to have been relatively beneficial in that the afflicted responded by migration, transition to new sectors and, in the case of farmers, mechanization of production as agricultural labour left the sector. I also contextualize the grain shock, highlighting that the grain producing regions overall were more economically unequal and had a labour reserve to shed as a signal was given by the price fall of grains in the 1880s.