James Lee and I just published “Socioeconomic differences in population growth in 19th century Liaoning, China: a decomposition” in Explorations in Economic History that divides population growth in Liaoning in the 19th century into the shares contributed by different time periods and different socioeconomic groups.
This paper ties together several decades of work by me, James and others on differentials in demographic outcomes like mortality, fertility and marriage. We have published numerous papers looking at how economic conditions, community context, and household and individual socioeconomic and other characteristics affected these demographic outcomes. These papers used patterns of differentials to map differences in access to the resources required to marry, have children, and avoid death.
The new paper examines how these patterns of differentials combined to determine the contributions that different groups and different time periods made to population growth. The paper compares the contributions made by households, lineages and communities of different sizes, as well as households with different numbers of members. Time periods are defined by grain prices. Like earlier articles, the paper makes use of data from the CMGPD-LN.
The paper is available open access here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101678