Is There Profit in Reforming the Poor? The English Experience, 1812-1855

改革穷人有好处吗？

• 批准号: 0095616
• 负责人: Gregory Clark
• 金额: $ 2.36万
• 依托单位: University of California-Davis
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-07-01 至 2002-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0095616&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: There; Profit; Reforming; Poor; English

This project estimates the social costs of the welfare system that operated in England prior to the Poor Law Reform of 1834. The old system gave all persons a legal entitlement to a subsistence income if they could not support themselves. Since the subsistence allowance for married workers with children was often greater than the available wage, it was feared the old system created great economic losses by reducing the work incentives and limiting labor mobility. The reform retained the right to subsistence, but subsistence was to be delivered in a much less attractive form to the able bodied - in a workhouse under close supervision. The reforms led to reduced welfare payments per head of the population after 1834. We measure whether these cuts produced the efficiency gains predicted by looking at what happened to the rental value of property in parishes where their were more poor relief recipients before the reform. We also test whether the reforms speeded migration from low wage rural parishes to high wage urban parishes. As part of the project we combine data on poor payments and land rents with a database on parish characteristics constructed by Clark under an earlier NSF grant to create a rich source of characteristics of parishes in England in the years 1800-51 that will be useful to future economic and social historians. We find that the Old Poor Law, despite its apparent deficiencies, served mainly as a transfer of income from land owners to the poor with little extra costs in the form of reduced labor inputs, labor effort, or labor mobility. These results that it was possible for many years to run a welfare system that guaranteed subsistence, and that more than 10% of the population in rural areas participated in, without creating great social costs. In future research we will explore what overlooked features of the old system kept social costs down.

该项目估计了1834年贫困法改革之前在英国运行的福利制度的社会成本。旧制度赋予所有人合法的权利，如果他们不能养活自己，就有权获得最低生活收入。由于有子女的已婚工人的生活津贴往往高于可用工资，人们担心旧制度会减少工作激励和限制劳动力流动，从而造成巨大的经济损失。改革保留了生存权，但对身体健全的人来说，生存的形式要差得多--在严密监督下的济贫院。1834年后，改革导致人均福利支出减少。我们通过观察教区房产的租金价值发生了什么来衡量这些削减是否产生了预期的效率提升，在改革之前，这些教区的房产接受救济的人更多。我们还测试了改革是否加快了从低工资的农村教区向高工资的城市教区的迁移。作为该项目的一部分，我们将贫穷的付款和土地租金的数据与克拉克根据NSF早期拨款建立的教区特征数据库相结合，以创建1800-51年英格兰教区特征的丰富来源，这将对未来的经济和社会历史学家有用。我们发现，尽管旧贫困法存在明显的缺陷，但它主要是将收入从土地所有者转移到穷人手中，几乎没有减少劳动力投入、劳动力努力或劳动力流动的额外成本。这些结果表明，多年来可以运行一种保障生活的福利制度，农村地区超过10%的人口参与其中，而不会造成巨大的社会成本。在未来的研究中，我们将探索旧系统中哪些被忽视的特征可以降低社会成本。