Chenxi's dissertation documents and replication in Applied Social Data Science.
Using Amartya’s entitlement approach, this paper research on 19th century’s Ireland population change trend and its mechanism. FAD theory predicts a casual relationship between food shortage and death, while a large number of empirical studies refute this argument and point out another fact identical with the entitlement approach, which is the casual relationship between the entitlements failure and the death. From Foucault’s bio-politics to population and political economics, all point to an endoge- nous mechanism of demographic change related to entitlements and increase.
This paper seeks to answer these two research questions: (1) Could 19th century Ireland, based on the well known potato late blight famine, still be a refutation of FAD theory? (2) When using entitlement approach, what kind of entitlement failures led to sustained negative population growth in 19th century Ireland?
With historical data and GAM regression, (1) when controlling for the amount of grain imported and exported, the acreage of food and the population change do not show significance. (2) Potato price, wage and the Poor Law are significant in predicting population change, where there is a negative relationship between potato price and population growth, and positive relationship between wage and Poor Law.
The results of the study suggest that although Ireland suffered from late potato blight in the 19th century, it was still not food shortages that led to negative population growth, but rather entitlement failures; furthermore, the failure of trade-based entitlements was the most significant cause of negative population growth, i.e., the unreasonable price of potatoes. The increase of own-labour entitlements, i.e., the increase of the wage, and the transfer and inheritance entitlements, i.e., the poor law, has slowed down the process of negative population growth.