Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? At first glance, with its rising levels of population and per capita income, it seems Russia was in a transition away from Malthusian equilibrium. However, the joint increase in population and per capita income could also have been the result of Russia’s high land-to-labor ratio. Which of the two is it? Such a problem is a frequent one in economic history, as many frontier economies have high land-to-labor ratios, which foil the researcher’s ability to determine whether an economy was transitioning or whether it was growing because of weak land constraints. In this paper, we use quarterly demographic and economic data from Moscow (which we take as a proxy for Russia) in conjunction with a Cointegrated Vector Autoregression approach to determine whether the Russian economy was transitioning away from a Malthusian equilibrium. We find signs of Malthusian pressures still operating while wages had stopped responding to changes in death and birth rates. This combination suggests that a vulnerable transition was truly underway even though a Malthusian shadow remained.

已故的俄罗斯帝国是否受到马尔萨斯的压力？乍一看，随着人口和人均收入水平的提高，俄罗斯似乎正在摆脱马尔萨斯均衡。然而，人口和人均收入的共同增长也可能是俄罗斯高土地与劳动力比率的结果。两者中的哪一个？这样的问题在经济史上很常见，因为许多前沿经济体的土地与劳动力比率很高，这阻碍了研究人员确定经济是否正在转型或是否由于土地限制薄弱而正在增长的能力。在本文中，我们使用来自莫斯科的季度人口和经济数据（我们将其作为俄罗斯的代表）结合协整向量自回归方法来确定俄罗斯经济是否正在摆脱马尔萨斯均衡。我们发现马尔萨斯压力的迹象仍在发挥作用，而工资已经停止对死亡率和出生率的变化做出反应。这种组合表明，尽管马尔萨斯阴影仍然存在，但脆弱的过渡确实正在进行中。