We re-explore Able-Smith and Townsend's landmark study of poverty in early post WW2 Britain. They found a large increase in poverty between 1953-4 and 1960, a period of relatively strong economic growth. Our re-examination is a first exploitation of the newly-digitised Board of Trade Household...

In this paper we reassess the food consumption and dietary impact of the regimes of food and food price control and eventually, food rationing, that were introduced in Britain during the First World War. At the end of the War the Sumner Committee was convened to investigate into effects of these...

We study the extent of overcrowding amongst British urban working families in the early 1900s and find major regional differences. In particular, a much greater proportion of households in urban Scotland were overcrowded than in the rest of Britain and Ireland. We investigate the causes of this...

The paper presents a statistical generalisation, to working families in the whole of Britain, of Rowntree's finding that absolute poverty declined dramatically in York between 1899 and 1936. We use poverty lines devised by contemporary social investigators and two relatively newly-discovered...

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was roughly halfway through a 60-year demographic transition with declining infant mortality and birth rates. Cities exhibited great and strongly correlated diversity in these rates. We demonstrate cross-section correlations with, for instance,...

This article re-examines the food consumption of working class households in 1904 and compares the nutritional content of these diets with modern measures of adequacy. We find a fairly steep gradient of nutritional attainment relative to economic class, with high levels of vitamin and mineral...

We examine Trevon Logan's 2009 claim to have found low levels of nutrition among British worker's households in the late 19th century. Using the same data, we conclude that Logan's estimates are thirty percent too low. Logan buttressed his estimates by claiming that the income elasticity of...

This paper analyses the changes in the size distribution of wages in Poland over a decade of transition. Until about 1998 there were some forces tending to increase wage inequality and other forces contracting it. The result was a relatively constant level of inequality. Privatisation was the...

This paper presents and analyses the sharp increase in hourly wage inequality after 1998 in Poland. The increase was similar in magnitude to the much-studied increase in British wage inequality during the 1980s. Using data from the Polish Labour Force Survey, we find this increase to be...

This paper seeks to document and analyse changes in the distribution of wages and employment in the transition countries since the collapse of communism. Most countries experienced an increase in wage inequality during the initial shock of the transition. Proximate causes of this increase seem...