New perspectives on the contribution of sanitary investments to mortality decline in English cities, 1845-1909.

Health improved in English cities in the last third of the nineteenth century, in tandem with substantial increases in public spending on water supplies and sanitation. However, previous efforts to measure the contribution of public expenditures to mortality improvements have been hampered by difficulties in quantifying public health investments and the lack of mortality data for specifically urban populations. We improve upon the existing evidence base by (1) creating measures of the stock of urban district sanitary capital, by type, on the basis of capital expenditure flows, rather than loan stocks; (2) using mortality and capital stock data that relate to the same administrative units (urban districts), and (3) studying the period 1880-1909 as well as the earlier period from 1845. The stock of sewerage capital was robustly related to improvements in all-cause mortality after 1880. The size of this effect varied with the extent of public investment in water supplies, suggesting complementarity between the two assets. For the period 1845-84, investments in water were associated with declines in infant and child mortality but the effect was much smaller and less precisely estimated in later decades. Our results suggest that improvements in water and sewerage targeted different transmission pathways for faecal-oral diseases.

Voting suffrage and the political budget cycle: Evidence from the London Metropolitan Boroughs 1902-1937.

We study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the London Metropolitan Boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes: taxpayer suffrage (1902-1914) and universal suffrage (1921-1937). We argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates differently under the two types of suffrage. Taxpayer suffrage, where the right to vote and the obligation to pay local taxes are linked, encourages demands for retrenchment and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year tax cuts and savings on administration costs. Universal suffrage, where all adult residents can vote irrespective of their taxpayer status, creates demands for productive public services and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year hikes in capital spending and a reduction in current spending.