The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence From A Historical Experiment
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Abstract
We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to our most conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. Additional evidence from within-country comparisons of city populations and adult heights also confirms the cross-country findings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Topic
- Historical Economic and Social Studies
- Field
- Economics, Econometrics and Finance
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- UrbanizationPopulationGeographyQuarter (Canadian coin)World populationPopulation growthDemographyEconomic geographyEconomic growthEconomicsArchaeologySociology
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes