MOHAMED SALEH

webinar link:  https://zoom.us/j/97869582781

Title: Export Booms and Net Fertility in a Malthusian Economy Evidence from the Lancashire Cotton Famine 

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of the boom in cotton prices that occurred during the American Civil War in 1861–1865 on net fertility (number of surviving children) in nineteenth-century rural Egypt, long before Egypt’s demographic transition. The boom generated a large positive income shock to cotton-suitable areas, as Egypt’s cotton output and exports quadrupled and remained at a high level even after prices subsided. This is expected to increase net fertility according to the Malthusian model. However, the cotton boom may have had a negative effect on public health and on net fertility, due to the cotton-boom-induced expansion in perennial irrigation and its association with the spread of Schistosomiasis (Bilharzia), a freshwater-borne parasitic worm that found a suitable habitat in Egypt’s new deep summer canals that kept water all year long. To address this question, I employ individual-level samples of Egypt’s population censuses in 1848 and 1868, where I infer for each individual their marital status and the number of their surviving children who co-reside with their parent(s), from the relationship to the household head. I use a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the timing of the cotton boom and the geographic variation in cotton suitability within rural Egypt. Preliminary findings suggest a negative impact of the cotton boom on net fertility. I hypothesize that this finding is driven by the unintended effect of the cotton-boom-induced expansion in perennial irrigation, on infection with Schistosomiasis and on net fertility (empirical evidence is in progress).

BIO: Mohamed SALEH is a Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse 1 Capitole University, France, and Research Affiliate at the Economic History Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His primary fields of interest are Economic History, Political Economy, and Development Economics. His research is focused on the Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa, where he employs novel primary (archival) and secondary (published) data sources to address long-standing questions in the field. He has been interested in two main themes of research: (1) the economic history of religion, and in particular how fiscal policy impacts the formation of religious groups, and their socioeconomic outcomes, via tax-induced conversions, and (2) the political economy of the coercion of labor, and the historical transition to non-coercive employment.