Demographic Pressure and the Irish Famine: Malthus after Mokyr.

This paper presents a fresh analysis of demographic pressure in pre-Famine Ireland. The crucial issue is one of measurement. Population pressure is taken as the ratio of population to non-reproducible natural resources, that is, land. To measure the latter by area ignores the considerable variations that exist in land quality. Therefore, a major innovation of this paper consists of constructing a measure of land quality, which is outlined in Section II. Although its use is restricted to a particular historical question, we hope the measure could have wider applicability, its performance in testing the Malthusian hypothesis is examined in Section III, together with our conclusions which include an interpretation of the cross sectional results based on an alternative framework to Mokyr's. However, we begin by reviewing Mokyr's work and his approach to the problem of measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]