Using published and unpublished data, mainly taken from the center of Spain and especially from Madrid, annual series of prices, wages and real wages between 1501 and 1991 have been constructed. A detailed explanation is given of the sources and procedures used in die construction of the series, and the reliability of the different adjustments is evaluated. The resulting time series clearly portray the medium and long-term trends of prices and wages in the center of Spain. When compared with English data, similar trends emerge.

By 1914, there were huge economic gaps between the Southern Cone plus Cuba and the rest of Latin America. Can they be explained by the varying ability of these countries to exploit the first great globalization boom after about 1870? Or did the gaps appear much earlier? And what about the gaps between Latin America and the Mediterranean, let alone with industrial leaders like Britain? What role did geographic isolation, globalization and demographic forces play in the process? Conventional GDP estimates are much too coarse to confront these questions. This essay uses a new data base on real wages and relative factor prices for seven Latin American and three Mediterranean regions, the latter being a source of so many of immigrants for the former. These ten regions, plus comparative information from Britain and the United States, form the data base for the paper.

This study builds the first internationally comparable index of real wages for Mexico City bridging the 18th and the early 20th century. Real wages started out in relatively high international levels in the mid 18th century, but declined from the late 1770s on, with some partial and temporal rebounds after the 1810s. After the 1860s, real wages recovered and eventually reached 18th-century levels in the early 20th century. Real wages of Mexico City’s workers subsequently fell behind those of high-wage economies to converge with the lower fringes of middle-wage economies. The age of the global Great Divergence was Mexico’s own age of stagnation and decline relative to the world economy.

This paper shows that there was an improvement in the barter terms of trade for non-fuel commodities vs. manufactures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, followed by significant deterioration over the rest of the 20th century. However, the decline over most of the 20th century was neither continuous nor was it distributed evenly among different commodity groups. The far-reaching changes that the world economy underwent around 1920 and again around 1979 led to a stepwise deterioration which, over the long term, was reflected in roughly a halving of real commodity prices. Tropical agriculture fared the worst, whereas minerals had the best performance, with non-tropical agriculture in an intermediate situation. The increase experienced in the first decade of the 21st century may be the beginning of a long-term upward trend, but it is too soon to tell.

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy believe that it has always had very high levels of inequality. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions that help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. This paper argues to the contrary. Compared with the rest of the world, Latin American inequality was not high either in pre-conquest 1491 or in the post-conquest decades following 1492. Indeed, it was not even high in the mid-19th century just before Latin America’s belle époque. It only became high thereafter. Historical persistence in Latin American inequality is a myth.

In recent theories of comparative development, the role of institutional differences has been crucial. Yet, what explains comparative institutional evolution? We investigate this issue by studying the coffee exporting economies of Latin America. Although homogeneous in many ways, they experienced radically different paths of economic (and political) development, which is conventionally traced to the differential organization of the coffee industry. We show that the different forms that the coffee economy took in the 19th century was critically determined by the legal environment determining access to land, and that different laws resulted from differences in the nature of political competition and the backgrounds of political elites. Our analysis suggests that explanations of institutional differences that stress economic fundamentals can only be part of the story. At least in the economies that we study, while geography, factor endowments and technology are clearly important, their implications for the institutional structure and thus development are conditional on the form that political competition takes in society. For interesting variations in economic outcomes, endowments are not fate.

This paper is an attempt at assessing the economic impact of market-oriented reforms undertaken during General Franco's dictatorship, in particular the 1959 Stabilisation and Liberalisation Plan. Using an index of macroeconomic distortions, the relationship between economic policies and the growth record is examined. Although a gradual reduction in macroeconomic distortions was already in motion during the 1950s, the 1959 Plan opened the way to a new institutional design that favoured a free market allocation of resources and allowed Spain to accelerate growth and catch up with Western Europe. Without the 1950s reforms and, especially, the 1959 Plan, per capita GDP would have been significantly lower in 1975.

Not all Europeans migrated to the United States. Between 1879 and 1930 around 13 million of Europeans went to Latin America; however, Latin America is not fully incorporated into current debates on the cost and benefits from Atlantic migration. This paper surveys Latin America's immigration from the late nineteenth century to 1930. It assesses inferences about European migrants in Latin America derived from the experience of migrants in the United States and questions its validity. The topics covered here include migration trends and chronology, national origin of the flows and the evolution of real wages. New data on the cost of passages for transatlantic migration is also presented. This is followed by an examination of the immigrants' contribution to economic growth in Latin America dealing basically with the issue of human capital brought in by European immigrants. The extent to which immigrants alter the composition of the labour force and the demographic structure, both in the short and the long run is also examined.

This paper attempts to establish a debate between alternative views of living standards in Spanish America during the viceregal period. Since 2009, a growing literature has shared a «common language» based on a similar, though not identical, methodology. As never before, this «new generation» of studies is built upon long series of quantitative data and international comparisons of nominal wages and prices which, in some cases, cover the whole Early Modern Era. Part of this literature also complements the examination of economic welfare using height as an indicator of biological welfare. Inequality is also quantitatively approached in one of the works discussed. In spite of significant similarities, some methodological differences lead to contrasting results. For the sake of simplicity, the relevant literature is divided into two views: «pessimism» and «optimism». It is my contention that the latter is more consistent with the available evidence.

This paper studies the expansion of mass education in Latin America in the twentieth century from a global comparative perspective. The paper argues that expansion in terms of enrolment and attainment levels was quite impressive. A comparative analysis of the grade enrolment distribution demonstrates, however, that the rapid expansion of primary school enrolment did not correspond with an equally impressive improvement in educational quality. The persistently large tertiary education bias in public education spending suggests that part of the poor quality performance is related to a lack of fscal support for primary education and that the political economy explanation for educational underdevelopment, as advanced by Engerman, Mariscal and Sokoloff for the 19th century, still applied to Latin America during most of the 20th century.

This paper outlines the development of world trade from 1800 to 1938. It relies on a newly compiled database, which, unlike previous works (e.g. Lewis 1981), reports series of imports and exports at current and constant prices and at current and constant (1913) borders for almost all existing polities. In the first sections, we outline the estimation methodology and assess the reliability of the series (now available at http://www.uc3m.es/tradehist_db). World trade grew very fast throughout the «long» 19th century, but growth rates were higher before 1870. We measure the effects of war and the Great Depression on total trade and trade by continent and polity. Within this general upward trend, the performance of polities differed by geographical location, level of development, political status and factor endowment. Finally, we estimate trends in the share of primary products, which declined until World War One, with an acceleration in the second half of the 19th century.

Las dificultades que existían para determinar la producción agraria a nivel nacional, en el siglo XIX, son bien conocidas. La poca fiabilidad del diezmo en muchas zonas del país después de la Guerra de la Independencia, y la falta de un catastro o de buenas informaciones del tamaño de la superficie cultivada, hicieron casi imposible la tarea de los economistas y agrónomos durante la mayor parte del siglo XIX para calcular cifras razonables de la producción. Por tanto, será muy difícil obtener hoy día un índice, bien con datos de los archivos o bien por métodos estadísticos indirectos, que muestre las fluctuaciones a corto plazo y que tenga un nivel de fiabilidad suficientemente alto para ser útil. No obstante, para obtener una aproximación de las transformaciones de la economía española a largo plazo, es necesario saber algo de los ritmos de cambio en el sector agrario. El historiador tiene dos posibilidades: utilizar fuentes como las estimaciones de producción que se encuentran en el Censo de Frutos y Manufacturas o las de la Junta Consultiva Agronómica (JCA) y Sodila, o recurrir a otros indicadores, como los cambios en la renta per capita o el consumo de alimentos, como aproximaciones.

The analysis of the evolution of the location of economic activity in Portugal between 1890 and 1980 depicts a strong concentration of productive activity in the coastal regions. We estimate data for regional GDP per capita, which show that the evolution of regional inequality followed an inverted U-curve, in line with that observed in other regions of Europe, but with a rather late peak, in 1970. The reasons for this behaviour may be found in the limits to industrialisation in the interior regions and the benefits generated by the agglomeration economies in the more developed coastal regions.

This paper attempts to contribute to the ongoing debate on the historical roots of the high economic inequality of contemporary Iberian America. Our approach, which is basically empirical, departs from the mainstream scholarship. We show new data on wages and heights in several viceroyalties that (1) suggest relatively medium-to-high levels of material welfare among the commoners in Bourbon Hispanic America; and (2) allow us to build indexes of economic inequality. An international comparison of those indexes casts some doubts on the widely accepted view that Viceroyal America’s economy was exclusively based on extremely unequal or extractive institutions, as it has been popularized by the influential works by Engerman and Sokoloff and Acemoglu et al.

Una de las diversas posibilidades que se me ofrecen para describir el contenido de las páginas que siguen, quizá la más fría y aséptica, pero también la más exacta, consiste en decir que cuantifica la evolución de una parte —en la actualidad, aproximadamente un sexto— del producto interior bruto de España desde mediados del siglo XIX hasta la actualidad.

Focusing on education–income anomalies, in which a richer country delivers less education than a poorer country, seems a promising way to harvest a part of the rich history that does not lend itself to econometrics. To test the chain of alleged causation from unequal power and wealth to poor schooling, one must follow the public money, or lack of it, in as many contexts as the data will allow. Public funding for mass schooling is the hitherto untested middle link in the chain. The key to Latin America’s poor schooling was the failure to supply tax money, not gender discrimination or any shortfall in market demand for skills. The most glaring anomalies were the Venezuelan and Argentine failures to supply the levels of tax support for mass schooling that their high income could have afforded.

The present paper explores the relationship between agrarian structure and human capital formation between and within Brazil’s federal units. It is argued that whether states’ agriculture is in plantation style, based on cheap coerced labor, or organized around family farming matters for the formulation of educational policies. According to the main claim, landlords were not interested in paying higher taxes to educate the masses and curtailed the expansion of schooling in order to keep a cheap workforce and maintain their monopoly over the decision-making process. Describing several episodes in Brazil’s history of public instruction, the paper stresses the distributional conflicts over education as well as the rural aristocracy’s resistance towards broadly-targeted, citizenship-enhancing educational policies. The descriptive evidence is complemented by statistical analyses employing historical as well as more recent data. It is shown that states characterized by a more egalitarian land distribution, which are not under the dominance of powerful landlords, exhibit better educational coverage and enhanced instruction quality. They also spend more on schooling.

This study presents the first results of an on-going study of longevity of large Spanish family firms. Its main objective is to provide solid data for a topic in which opinions are more abundant than scientific statistics, as well as to identify the keys to the survival and competitiveness of the almost 250 firms included in the study. It concludes that this reality is not just the result of two decades of integration in Europe or a fortunate endowment with some natural resources, but the outcome of a long learning process and the combination of two factors: specialization in market niches in which the state had no strategic interests and the creation of personal networks of cooperation and influence within and outside Spain.

The labor income share in national income is a good indicator of the extent to which the working classes are able to reap the fruits of economic growth or, conversely, bear the burden of economic stagnation. This paper aims to reconstruct the labor income share of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico in a three-sector framework, including the rural, the urban formal and the urban informal sectors. We find that in all three countries the share of labor earnings peaked in the middle of the 20th century. Fluctuations in the Brazilian and Mexican labor income shares were large, with a sharp decline in the post-1961 and post-1976 periods, respectively. In Argentina, the labor income shares tended to be more constant at levels around 50 per cent, testifying to a more stable and egalitarian distribution of income.

This paper presents a first estimate of income inequality in the Southern Cone of South America (Brazil 1872 and 1920, Chile 1870 and 1920, Uruguay 1920) and some assumptions with regard to Argentina (1870 and 1920) and Uruguay (1870). We find that income distribution was relatively high on the eve of the first globalization boom. Thus, inequality is not only the result of globalization, but also a structural feature. Inequality increased between 1870 and 1920, both within individual countries and between countries. Globalization forces do not result in obvious outcomes. Rather, the effect of globalization on inequality depends on the expansion of the frontier and institutional persistence and change in old and new areas. Inequality was clearly high in the wake of the globalization process. This was a particular kind of inequality, which was part of a set of institutions closely linked to the exports of primary goods, sluggish technological change and limited human capital formation.