A short answer is, not very. In contrast to economic growth, where the free market is commonly viewed as a prime mover, mortality in the last two centuries has not been greatly helped by market forces. The classic sources of market failure – information failures, externalities, public goods, principal-agent, and free rider problems – have been pervasive. Nor has economic growth itself been behind the worldwide improvement in life expectancy. In the primitive state of nineteenth century health knowledge, the immense rise in urbanisation engendered by economic growth largely vitiated any positive level-of-living effects by increasing exposure to disease. Instead, public policy initiatives, based on new knowledge of disease and new institutions, have been essential to the improvement of life expectancy, both in urban areas and nationwide.

Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood. – Jonathan Swift, A Description of a City Shower, 1710

The Portuguese Republic of 1910–1926 was characterised by extreme instability in the political and economic spheres. The authoritarian regime that succeeded the Republic claimed legitimacy asserting that democracy naturally implied fiscal and monetary instability. In this article we study the Republican period and the Monarchy that immediately preceded it, in order to test three hypotheses as to the roots of instability during the Republic: exceptionally high public expenditure made necessary by participation in World War I, the Fiscal Hypothesis; expansion of the money supply and increase in its variability, the Monetary Hypothesis; social and political unrest, facilitated by greater freedom in expressing grievances, the Democracy Hypothesis. Using standard econometric techniques we find strong evidence in favour of the Monetary and the Democracy Hypotheses but not in favour of the Fiscal Hypothesis. Moreover, our results support the view that political and monetary instability were mutually reinforcing phenomena. The examination of the two periods, Monarchy and Republic, reveals a strong positive association between political and economic cycles in the later, more democratic period.

This article examines the bank amalgamation movement in England between 1870 and 1914. I assemble data on all publicly traded English bank equities and use a simple finance model to estimate the effects of concentration. Holding returns on English bank stocks declined steadily over the period, which I attribute to a negative demand shock resulting from banks' declining importance relative to other financial intermediaries. Once this decline is accounted for, increased concentration appears to have bolstered bank returns. This suggests that increased concentration may have rendered English banks less efficient as allocators of capital and may have contributed to Britain's industrial decline.

[The amalgamation] movement appears to have by no means reached its limits, and it is neither safe nor easy to predict with any confidence the eventual outcome of a movement of which the development is incomplete. Whether or not … in the course of a few more years all banking business in this country will be monopolised by some half dozen powerful institutions, there seems little reason to doubt that many of the old inducements to amalgamation still operate, and that the closing years of the century will witness a further reduction in the number of existing banks. In any event, conjecture as to the ultimate outcome of the tendency must be mainly based on past experience, and in light of that experience the question of whether the movement is likely on the whole to be a beneficial one must be discussed.1

This article compares the effects of weather shocks on agricultural production in Britain, France and Germany during the late nineteenth century. Using semi-parametric models to estimate the non-linear agro-weather relationship we find that weather shocks explain between one third to two thirds of variations in agricultural production. Given the large size of the agricultural sector during this period, the high variance of agricultural production and the cyclical nature of weather shocks, the agro-weather relationship transmitted large effects on macroeconomic fluctuations over much of the period.