The Urban Penalty

Abstract: The stimulus for this essay was given by the fact that life expectancy in certain countries started to increase long before the development of modern medicine. Having as a principal axis the so called „urban penalty‟, the analysis was limited in two port cities; Glasgow and Malmö. Data on crude, age-specific and disease-specific mortality were used over the period 1800-1914 in order to identify the mortality development of these two cities. In addition, data on various investments were used for the two cities mentioned above. All these combined, tried to answer a principal question concerning whether the reduction in mortality before the advancement of modern medicine was associated with investments. If the answer to this question was positive, two secondary questions were raised concerning firstly, which investment proved to be more effective, and secondly, if there was an investment that could be described as a „common ingredient of success‟. The analysis of these two cities revealed that undoubtedly their mortality decline over the second half of the 19th century was driven by investments; however, it did not manage to reveal any „winner‟ in terms of efficiency, or any common „ingredient of success‟.