Over the same period, certain other factorsâfor example, higher energy costsâhad a greater effect on food prices than did the use of ethanol as a motor fuel.â. Congressional Budget Office, The Impact of Ethanol Use on Food Prices and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, April 2009.
Thousands of innocent Jews, who had also suffered from the plague, were slaughtered in dozens of European communities. Social and Economic Effects of the Black Death. Some social changes caused by the Black Death were positive. Before the plague, peasant serfs were confined to their lord's estate and received little or no payment for their work. Overpopulation and shortage of resources led to malnutrition and extreme poverty for many peasants.
The international effects of Black Death. Death and disease were familiar features of life in the Middle Ages, but previous epidemics were dwarfed by the arrival of the Black Death. It erupted out of central Asia to create a pandemic greater even than the Plague of Justinian 800 years earlier. Present in bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic forms, the Black Death had killed millions by the time it finally declined. Europe may have lost a third of its people, China perhaps half.