ECON 334 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Infant Mortality
Document Summary
Last lecture recap: the demography of western europe before 1800 has been intensively researched. Main sources for preindustrial europe: census and parish records of baptisms, burials, and marriages. In a malthusian society, the key to higher income and longer life expectancy lies in low fertility rates: birth schedules seem to have been lower in northwestern europe than in other regions. A higher fertility rate in asia alone cannot explain this. Mortality rates here must have been lower than in europe. I(cid:374) (cid:1005)(cid:1010)(cid:1004)(cid:1004), e(cid:374)gla(cid:374)d"s life e(cid:454)pe(cid:272)ta(cid:374)(cid:272)(cid:455) at age (cid:1006)(cid:1004) (cid:449)as (cid:1007)(cid:1009) (cid:455)ears. That is, so(cid:373)eo(cid:374)e (cid:449)ho lived to be 20 could expect to reach 55 years of age: this implies that most deaths happened in infancy, e(cid:374)gla(cid:374)d"s i(cid:374)fa(cid:374)t (cid:373)ortalit(cid:455) i(cid:374) the pre-industrial period was between 18 and 21%. One in five children did not live past infancy. Life expectancy did not seem to vary much in any given society throughout the preindustrial period.
