An eclectic array of quantitative data sketches public and private poor relief in the century before 1880, and invites new interpretations. Church and secular charity was meagre in the eighteenth century, and probably earlier. While richer countries transferred a higher share of national income to the poor than did poorer countries, the trend in this share failed to march upward with income across the nineteenth century. Some explanations are proposed for the differences between countries and the decline in poor relief's share of national income in England-Wales and the Low Countries before 1880. It may be that the newly franchised had stronger reasons to oppose tax-based relief than the elites who had voice at the start of the century. Changes in voice partly explain the movements of English poor relief over time and space. So do movements in the chances that the disenfranchised would exit from cooperating and supplying labour.

This article examines private Austrian investment in the Hungarian economy as an example of private financial investment in a backward foreign economy in the late nineteenth century. The main finding is the dominant role of Austrian investment in institutional securities such as Hungarian state bonds and bank securities, which comprised a steadily rising proportion in the portfolios of investors. The only other important sector of the Hungarian economy that was invested in directly was the transport system, which depended on the fluctuations in the development of the Hungarian economy rather than on long-term trends. Securities of the manufacturing sector did not attract the interest of most Austrian investors. Banks and the state thus constituted an element of stability in the Hungarian economy and helped it to acquire funds that could not be provided by the domestic market.

Understanding the pattern of postwar slowdown in Soviet productivity growth requires evaluation of the impact of World War II and associated shocks. Continuous productivity series for industry and the whole economy are estimated for the period 1928–85. The pattern of Soviet productivity growth was highly disturbed; by postwar standards its underlying growth was slow. Rapid growth and slowdown from the late 1940s through the 1960s and beyond are explained just by postwar recovery possibilities and their exhaustion. Clear evidence of an adverse break in the productivity trend does not transpire until the 1970s.

The purpose of this article is to present new evidence on living standards during the Spanish industrialisation process by means of secular trends in height. The data pertain to Elche, a town in the Valencia region of southeastern Spain that witnessed early and rapid industrial development in the context of Spain's delayed industrialisation and experienced strong immigration during the twentieth century. Thus, the relationship between biological standards of living and industrialisation and urbanisation is explored. The data suggest that the first stages of industrialisation in the late nineteenth century did not bring much improvement to workers' living conditions. The consequences to health and nutrition of Spain's Civil War and its aftermath are also examined. Finally, we comment on the process of general convergence in height that took place at the end of the period considered.