Dissertation Research in Economics: Trade and Demography in British India

南亚经济史上一个经久不衰的争论是关于两个世纪以来英国统治对经济表现和社会福利的影响。计量一直是一个有争议的问题：工资、价格和农业产量一直被学者们使用和批评。然而，众所周知对经济活动有重大影响的人口指标在这场辩论中并未占据突出地位。在其他前工业社会中，我们知道出生率和死亡率随着经济冲击而系统性地变化，所以我们希望通过这些人口参数了解更多像英属印度这样的经济体是如何发展的。特别是，本建议重新审视了主要基础设施提供的影响问题，即铁路的推出对普通人的福利的影响，作为这种方法的例证。该项目将收集和分析英属印度人口普查的人口数据、生命统计数据以及19世纪70年代至20世纪20年代殖民统计序列中的经济数据。该项目的第一个贡献将是建立一个新的通用人口数据集，记录地区一级的年出生和死亡情况，提供一种新的、比现有的南亚人口历史更分类的描述。第二个贡献是对这一时期人口和经济因素之间动态相互作用的更透彻的理解，例如死亡率下降的原因和公共卫生支出的效力。最后，本研究将利用这些数据来检验开放贸易和铁路的到来是否或如何影响人口增长。鉴于贸易理论和马尔萨斯人口学的结合暗示，贸易的收益应该反映在更高的生育率和/或更低的死亡率上，本研究将从理论上探索和实证检验一种机制，该机制可以解释贸易开放如何无法改善人均福利。

An enduring debate in South Asian economic history concerns the consequences of two centuries of British rule on economic performance and social welfare. Measurement has been a contentious issue: wages, prices, and agricultural yields have been used and criticized by scholars. However, population indicators which are known to have a major influence on economic activity have not featured prominently in this debate. In other preindustrial societies, we know that birth and death rates varied systematically with economic shocks, so we expect to learn more about how an economy like the British Indian economy developed through these demographic parameters. In particular, this proposal revisits the question of the impact major infrastructure provision, i.e., of the rollout of railroads on the welfare of ordinary people as an illustration of this method.The project will collect and analyze demographic data from British Indian censuses, vital statistics, and economic data from colonial statistical serials from the 1870s through the 1920s. The first contribution of the project will consist of the construction of a new general-use demographic dataset of annual births and deaths at the district level, providing a new and more disaggregated description of the demographic history of South Asia than currently exists. The second contribution is a more thorough understanding of the dynamic interplay between demography and economic factors in this period, such as the causes of the mortality decline and the efficacy of public health expenditures. Finally, this research will employ these data to examine whether or how opening up to trade and the arrival of the railroads affected population growth. Given that theories of trade and Malthusian demography in conjunction imply that gains from trade should be reflected in higher fertility and/or lower mortality, this research will explore theoretically and test empirically a mechanism that could explain how opening up to trade may fail to improve per-capita welfare.