Abstract This study focuses on two central aspects of labour conditions: job control and occupational safety. It draws on the rich collection of documents preserved in the archives of the Opera del Duomo in Florence, covering the period from 1353, when the construction of the Dome resumed following the Black Death, to 1436, the year of the cathedral’s consecration. The analysis begins with job control, examining labour performed outside the formal workplace, dismissal and absenteeism, cases of theft, fraud, and moral misconduct, as well as the control of materials and working time. It then turns to occupational safety, exploring the mechanisms used to mitigate occupational risks, the imposition of fines for non-compliance, and the punishments for violations of workplace rules, which in some cases included imprisonment. The study also considers how workplace injuries were documented and treated as part of a broader system of labour regulation and protection and discusses the determinants of workers’ compensations. The results reveal general patterns in job control and suggest that oversight of the workforce tends to intensify during periods of heightened construction activity.
Abstract Children’s work is a complex decent work challenge. Despite its historical decline, around 138 million minors are still engaged in child labor worldwide today. While it is fundamental to understand how child work declined in the past, historical estimations are difficult due to inconsistent and incomparable country data sources – even for Europe during the 20 th century. To address this understudied issue, this article presents a new dataset on children’s work for post-war Europe. Building on retrospective approaches developed in the literature, it extends this methodology to European-wide data for the first time, producing new estimates of child work rates for ages 10 to 14 and 10 to 17 across 13 countries, as well as Europe as a whole, between 1950 and 1990. This data provides evidence of persistent but often overlooked patterns of children’s work in recent decades in Europe, particularly in under-researched regions such as northern and southern Europe. Child work remained significant in the first post-war decade, declined steadily between 1960 and 1980, and then slowed or stagnated by 1990, especially among older minors. This paper provides researchers with a complementary resource to study children’s work in Europe during the 20 th century. The methodology presented can be applied to alternative sources, contexts, and labor issues, extending the scope of future research on both child work and decent work.
Abstract African economic history has experienced a revival during the 21 st century through the globalisation of economic history as a field and a growing interest in how history has shaped current economic inequalities. This survey reviews the development of the field since its initial foundations, and illustrates the ways in which more recent work has diverged in its methods and approaches. It focuses on three main themes: the effort to bring Africa into global economic history through the construction of comparative datasets and the application of methods derived from the study of other regions; the role of African institutions in shaping these patterns of economic development; and looking beyond the state to religion, culture and entrepreneurship. The survey concludes by identifying some gaps and ideas for future research.
Abstract We assess the Spanish Monarchy’s ability to implement its policies using an output measure – the distribution of the Bull of the Crusade – and examine how shifts in state capacity influenced subjective well-being. In a religious society such as early modern Spain, spiritual satisfaction serves as a measure of subjective well-being. Purchasing the Bull reduced fear of purgatory and therefore death anxiety and thus increased life satisfaction. Our measure of subjective well-being – the logarithmic ratio of bulls sold to the population – indicates whether spiritual satisfaction was attained. According to this indicator, subjective well-being declined in the late 1570s and 1580s during years of severe financial crisis, in the 1640s during the Catalan Revolt, and collapsed during Spain’s War of Succession (1701 to 1714) and its aftermath. Reductions in state capacity coincided with decreases in spiritual satisfaction, while demand for bulls remained relatively stable over time. Declines in state capacity appear to be the primary factor behind these decreases in spiritual satisfaction and, consequently, lower subjective well-being.
Abstract The Human Development Index (HDI) can be interpreted as a paternalistic social welfare function, derived directly from social indicators rather than from individual preferences. Although it ranks countries on the basis of aggregated measures, the HDI lacks a clear cardinal interpretation unless an objective meaning is assigned to the concept of human development. Drawing on the Atkinson-Kolm-Sen analytical framework, this paper introduces the Balanced Human Development Index (BHDI), which shifts the focus from the overall level of human development to its internal structure. The BHDI measures how closely observed outcomes approach the human development possibility frontier. While it remains paternalistic, the BHDI provides a consistent cardinal interpretation and allows for meaningful comparisons across countries and over time – even in contexts where the absolute HDI values are less informative. The BHDI index is governed by a single parameter that reflects the degree of aversion to imbalances across the different dimensions of human development. Its trajectory is not necessarily monotonic, even when the individual well-being dimensions are positively correlated. As a result, the BHDI reveals historical patterns that remain hidden when relying solely on the HDI. To illustrate its potential, this paper presents BHDI estimates for a selection of countries, using a comprehensive dataset provided by Leandro Prados de la Escosura.
