Disentangling the Demographic Determinants of the English Take-off: 1530-1860

We propose a model with some of the main demographic, economic and institutional factors usually considered to matter in the transition to modern growth. We apply our theory to England over the period 1530-1860. We use the model to measure the impact of mortality, population density and technological progress on school foundations, literacy and growth through a set of experiments. We find that one third of the rise in literacy over the period 1530-1850 can be directly related to the rise in population density, while one sixth is linked to higher longevity and one half to exogenous total factor productivity growth. Moreover, the timing of the effect of population density in the model is consistent with the available evidence for England, where it is shown that schools were established at a high rate over the period 1540-1620. JEL codes: O41, I21, R12, J11. 1Boucekkine and de la Croix acknowledge financial support from the Belgian French speaking community (Grant ARC 03/08-235 “New macroeconomic approaches to the development problem”) and the Belgian Federal Government (Grant PAI P5/21, “Equilibrium theory and optimization for public policy and industry regulation”). We thank T. Lindh, B. Malmberg, seminar participants at IIASA (Vienna), two anonymous referees, and the editor for their comments on an earlier draft. We thank David Cressy for providing useful information on English schools prior to the Industrial Revolution. Contact addresses: Dept. of Economics, Place Montesquieu 3, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].