By Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia and (Norwegian University of Science and Technology; CEPR) and Francisco J. Marco-Gracia (University of Zaragoza; Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón). Blog post based on the article with the same name published in the European Review of Economic History (here).
Many
pre-industrial societies regulated population size by resorting to infanticide
and the mortal neglect of unwanted infants and children (Langer 1972; Harris and Ross 1987; Hrdy 1999). These practices have traditionally
targeted girls in India, China and Japan, among other countries characterised
by strong patriarchal traditions that favour males (Das Gupta el al. 2003; Bhaskar and Gupta 2007; Drixler 2013). Women’s status in
historical Europe was definitely more advantageous than in other parts of the
world but Europe was not a gender-equal paradise and women were discriminated against in many dimensions (Szoltysek
et al. 2017; Carmichael and Rijpma 2017; Dilli et al. 2019). In this regard,
although the traditional narrative nonetheless defends that European families did
not neglect their female babies (Derosas and Tsuya
2010; Lynch 2011), several studies
suggest that female infanticide, as a means of controlling the size and sex
composition of their offspring, was more widespread that commonly thought, especially
in Southern Europe (Hanlon 2016; Beltrán Tapia and Raftakis 2021; Echavarri 2021).
By
relying on the parish records of all the population living in a rural Spanish region
between 1750 and 1950 (almost 60,000 individuals), this article evidences that discriminatory
practices increased female mortality shortly after birth. Firstly, aggregate sex
ratios obtained from baptismal records were exceptionally high, at least until
the late 19th century (figure 1). Secondly, the individual-level
information shows that the probability of being male at baptism was
significantly higher when there were no previous male siblings alive, a feature
that could trigger discrimination in the presence of son preference. Likewise,
as evidenced by death registers, female survival chances during the first one
or two days of life were also negatively affected by this same feature, as well
as by the number of siblings alive. These findings seem to be concentrated at
higher parities and among landless and semi-landless families which were
subject to harsher economic conditions and therefore more likely to resort to
extreme decisions under difficult circumstances.
Figure 1. Sex ratios at
baptism, 1575-1975
Note: 25-year moving average. Dotted
lines represent the 95 per cent confidence interval. Source: AMHDB.
Crucially,
the fact that the results are robust to employing data from birth and death
registers rules out the possibility that under-registration explains this
pattern: although female misreporting would bias sex ratios at birth upwards,
it would have the opposite effect on mortality rates. Taken together, these
findings strongly support the idea that a significant fraction of female babies
were neglected or disposed away. These discriminatory patterns affecting female
mortality shortly after birth disappeared during the first decades of the 20th
century, as soon as the demographic transition and other economic, social and
cultural changes reduced general mortality rates and undermined the strong son
preference detected here.
The
mortal neglect of girls shortly after birth was probably a conscious family
decision that affected a number of families under certain circumstances. Apart
from the need to provide dowries for their daughters, the fact that there
existed less female waged labour opportunities also militated against girls.
The sources are though silent regarding how these girls went missing. There
were of course many ways of disposing of unwanted children and these crimes
were easy to commit and difficult to prove (starvation, dehydration,
strangulation, drugged to death, smothering, exposure to elements, etc. It is
also plausible that families could have not striven enough to keep them alive
especially during the crucial first hours of life. Given that there is
hardly any anecdotal evidence on female infanticide, our findings suggest that
some families disguised female infanticide or neglect as natural deaths.
The
evidence provided here shows that families especially targeted girls, but boys
could have undoubtedly fell victims to these practices as well. This article
therefore not only challenges the notion that there were no missing girls in
historical Europe, but also suggests that these families regulated the size and
sex composition of their offspring. These findings have important implications
for our understanding of the traditional demographic regime and the subsequent
transition to lower fertility and mortality rates because the relatively low
number of children raised by these families cannot be longer explained solely by
the use of different methods to reduce fertility either indirectly (delaying age
at marriage or celibacy) or directly (spacing or stopping). By increasing the
mortality of their unwanted children, these families also adopted a “death control”. The
gradual disappearance of these practices would therefore partly contribute to
explaining the decline in fertility and mortality that took place during the
demographic transition. Likewise, the fact that many of these deaths escaped
from birth and death registers also indicates that fertility and mortality
rates in these areas were higher than what it has been traditionally assumed.
Sara Torregrosa-Hetland
Oriol Sabaté
The World
Wars were associated with progressive tax policies in most Western countries.
Top marginal income tax rates increased to unprecedented levels, while other
fiscal instruments, such as excess profits taxes, were implemented during the
wars to meet the extraordinary revenue needs (Scheve and Stasavage, 2016).
In the
income tax, this leap in progressive reforms came along with the broadening of
the tax base, which brought for the first time low and middle incomes into the
tax (Brownlee, 1996; Broadberry and Howlett, 1998, 2005; Rockoff, 2012). This
fundamental transformation was the result of both regulatory changes, which
reduced exemption limits and personal deductions, and high levels of inflation,
which eroded the real value of these same exemption limits and deductions, pushing
incomes previously excluded from paying the tax into the fiscal net (even
though their real incomes did not increase).
Our
latest paper published in EREH (Torregrosa-Hetland and
Sabaté, 2021a) quantifies the role that inflation played in the
downward expansion of the tax during the World Wars. We first clarify and
estimate the ways in which inflation affects the distribution of income tax due
across different levels of income, and, second, calculate its effects on tax progressivity
and redistribution. Specifically, we analyze the income taxes of Sweden,
the United Kingdom and the United States, by comparing the actual operation of
the tax with alternative counterfactual scenarios of lower or no inflation
(here, as in the paper, we concentrate on our first counterfactual, defined by
the level of inflation over the five pre-war years). The exercise is based on
disaggregating the original tabulated tax data (following Blanchet et al.,
2017), and imputing income tax payments to the synthetic observations according
to the regulations in place (see also Torregrosa-Hetland and Sabaté, 2021b).
Inflation expanded the tax: more taxpayers, more
revenue
Our results
show that inflation was indeed a powerful mechanism for the downward expansion
of the tax. By the end of World War I, 75% of British taxpayers had been
incorporated into the fiscal net by excess inflation. This figure reached 68%
and 38% in Sweden and the United States respectively. The impact of inflation
by 1920 in Sweden was so extreme that these new taxpayers amounted to 28% of
the total tax units in the country (i.e., of the total number of potential tax
returns if everyone would have been required to file). During World War II,
nearly 4 million British taxpayers started paying the tax for no other reason
than nominal increases in their incomes (see Table 1).
Table 1. Additional taxpayers brought in by inflation
|
Country |
Year |
Scenario |
New taxpayers brought in by inflation |
||
|
Absolute number |
Percent of total taxpayers |
Percent of total tax units |
|||
|
Sweden |
1920 |
1 |
933,924 |
71% |
30% |
|
1920 |
2 |
876,513 |
68% |
28% |
|
|
1946 |
1 |
292,665 |
11% |
8% |
|
|
1946 |
2 |
166,053 |
6% |
4% |
|
|
United Kingdom |
1919 |
1 |
2,913,250 |
77% |
12% |
|
1919 |
2 |
2,840,603 |
75% |
12% |
|
|
1949 |
1 |
6,282,209 |
45% |
24% |
|
|
1949 |
2 |
4,013,889 |
29% |
15% |
|
|
United States |
1919 |
1 |
1,488,373 |
44% |
4% |
|
1919 |
2 |
1,300,997 |
38% |
3% |
|
|
1946 |
1 |
2,670,648 |
6% |
5% |
|
|
1946 |
2 |
1,484,428 |
4% |
3% |
|
Inflation
did not only bring new taxpayers into the tax, but also pushed existing
taxpayers into higher tax brackets (due to the erosion of the real value of
bracket limits and deductions). As a result, inflation was responsible for as
much as 80% of the income tax revenue in Sweden in 1920, and near 65% and 57%
in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1919 (see Table 2). Of this
additional “inflation revenue”, the majority was paid by existing taxpayers
that had been pushed into higher tax brackets (84% in Sweden by the end of World
War I, and above 90% in the United Kingdom and the United States; see Table 3).
New taxpayers entered massively into the tax during the two wars, but their
relatively low effective tax rates (particularly during World War I) made the
revenue impact more modest in absolute terms.
Table 2. Additional income tax revenue brought in by inflation
|
Country |
Year |
Scenario |
New tax revenue brought in by inflation |
|
|
Million current krs / £ / $ |
Percent of total income tax revenue |
|||
|
Sweden |
1920 |
1 |
145 |
82% |
|
1920 |
2 |
142 |
80% |
|
|
1946 |
1 |
588 |
44% |
|
|
1946 |
2 |
391 |
29% |
|
|
United Kingdom |
1919 |
1 |
210 |
67% |
|
1919 |
2 |
200 |
64% |
|
|
1949 |
1 |
822 |
67% |
|
|
1949 |
2 |
602 |
49% |
|
|
United States |
1919 |
1 |
880 |
63% |
|
1919 |
2 |
801 |
57% |
|
|
1946 |
1 |
7,629 |
41% |
|
|
1946 |
2 |
4,966 |
27% |
|
Table 3. Distribution of the additional revenue caused by inflation
between taxpayer groups
|
Country |
Year |
Scenario |
New taxpayers brought in by inflation |
Rest of taxpayers |
Top 10% of tax units |
Top 1% of tax units |
|
Sweden |
1920 |
1 |
17.3% |
82.7% |
80.6% |
52.3% |
|
1920 |
2 |
15.2% |
84.8% |
80.3% |
52.0% |
|
|
1946 |
1 |
3.9% |
96.1% |
57.0% |
27.3% |
|
|
1946 |
2 |
2.9% |
97.1% |
56.9% |
27.1% |
|
|
United Kingdom |
1919 |
1 |
8.0% |
92.0% |
97.8% |
76.6% |
|
1919 |
2 |
7.6% |
92.4% |
97.6% |
76.1% |
|
|
1949 |
1 |
17.3% |
82.7% |
66.7% |
33.5% |
|
|
1949 |
2 |
13.4% |
86.6% |
65.0% |
32.3% |
|
|
United States |
1919 |
1 |
8.0% |
92.0% |
99.9% |
80.6% |
|
1919 |
2 |
7.1% |
92.9% |
99.9% |
80.4% |
|
|
1946 |
1 |
0.7% |
99.3% |
55.0% |
31.0% |
|
|
1946 |
2 |
0.4% |
99.6% |
54.7% |
30.6% |
Inflation made the income tax less progressive, but
more redistributive
What was
the impact of these changes in the progressivity of the income tax? Since the
increases in tax burden were, in relative terms, more intense at the bottom of
the income distribution, inflation had a regressive effect. This was particularly
true in the United Kingdom during World War I. Figure 1 and 2 show the extent
to which low and middle incomes became subject to higher average effective tax
rates by the end of the wars due to inflation.
Figure 1.
Average effective tax rates under different inflation scenarios at the end of
WWI
Figure 2. Average effective tax rates under different inflation scenarios at the end of WWII
Interestingly,
though, the impact of inflation on redistribution was positive. While inflation
reduced the level of progressivity, it increased the size of a still
progressive tax, which in turn increased the amount of income that was placed
into the redistributive channel. For instance, the British income tax reduced
inequality by 5.11 Gini points in 1919, and no less than 28% of this effect was
caused by accumulated excess inflation since 1913. In this way, inflation was
one of the drivers of the transition from a ‘class tax’ into a ‘mass tax’: one
that obtained revenue from most of the population, forming a strong basis for
fiscal citizenship, and which became one of the major redistributive instruments
of the post-war era/for decades to come.
References
BLANCHET, T., FOURNIER, J., and PIKETTY, T. (2017):
Generalized Pareto Curves: Theory and Applications. WID.world Working Paper
Series 2017/3.
BROADBERRY, S. and HOWLETT, P. (1998): 'The United Kingdom: ‘Victory at all costs’',
in M. Harrison (Ed.), The Economics of
World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 43-80.
BROADBERRY, S. and HOWLETT, P. (2005): 'The
United Kingdom during World War I: business as usual?', in S. Broadberry and M.
Harrison (eds.) The Economics of World
War I, New York: Cambridge University Press, 206-234.
BROWNLEE, E. (1996): Federal Taxation in America: A History, New York: Cambridge
University Press.
ROCKOFF, H. (2012). America’s
Economic Way of War. War and the US Economy from the Spanish-American War to
the Persian Gulf War. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
SCHEVE, K., and D. STASAVAGE (2016): Taxing
the Rich. A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe.
Princeton University Press.
TORREGROSA-HETLAND, S., and SABATÉ, O. (2021a): 'Income tax progressivity and inflation during the World Wars', forthcoming in European Review
of Economic History.
TORREGROSA-HETLAND, S., and SABATÉ, O. (2021b): 'Income taxes and
redistribution in the early twentieth century', Lund Papers in Economic History:
General Issues; no. 224.
