What were the economic effects of the Black Death on Western Europe?

The Black Death
was a pandemic that killed up to 200 million people in Europe during the fourteenth century. Its
economic impacts were enormous.

The immediate effect was a sharp downturn in
agricultural production as a result of loss of labor. This, in turn, prompted widespread
famine.

Not all impacts were necessarily negative, however. A shortage of
labor for agricultural production, created by the large death toll, generated upward pressure on
wages. Peasants were able to demand more for their work, which resulted inat least temporarilya
better distribution of wealth. In England, one response to this growing demand for higher wages
was the Statute of Laborers of 1351. The new ordinance set out that every healthy unemployed
person of working age must accept any job offered to him and could not demand wages beyond those
that were offered. This met with varying degrees of success.

href="https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black-death/">https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-bl...
href="https://www.tandfonline.com/action/cookieAbsent">https://www.tandfonline.com/action/cookieAbsent