Mass emigration was one key feature of the Great Irish Famine which distinguishes it from today’s famines. By bringing famine victims to overseas food supplies, it undoubtedly saved many lives. Poverty traps prevented those most in need from availing of this form of relief, however....

Analysis of marital fertility in rural Derry c. 1911 confirms the presence even then of a gap between Catholics and Protestants. The difference was small, however, compared to today's, and for couples who had married before the mid-1880's it was insignificant. Various indicators of 'wealth'...

Much of the controversy about labour migration concerns an aspect which is not easily measured, the 'quality' of the flow. The first part of the paper applies logit analysis to a sample of emigrants from an Irish border county for some insight on the issue. The results suggest that while those...

The paper describes the insights which trade theory can provide into economic developments in Ireland during the 1930s. First, a version of Ronald Jones's "specific factors" model is applied to the period after 1932, when a policy which combined industrial tariff protection and controls on...

The contrasting tariff regimes of Northern and Southern Ireland after 1932 must have influenced industrial structure and specialization. Can a comparison of Northern and Southern data from the 1960s, just before the South began to opt for trade liberalization again, 'reveal' the damage done by...

An important drawback of single equation migration models is that in effect they assume wages and employment to be independent of the level of migration. Williamson has proposed instead a simple general equilibrium model with labour supply and demand equations for sending and receiving countries...