This article makes a contribution to the empirical and methodological discussion on the standard of living in Latin America during the colonial period. It presents evidence obtained from primary sources on the evolution of nominal wages, cost of living and real wages for 10 occupational categories in the region of Montevideo between 1760 and 1810. The results place rural laborers and masons in Montevideo below subsistence levels until at least the first decade of the 19th century, a finding that is difficult to reconcile with the demographic and productive growth of the region at the same time. Wages may not be the main component in the structure of family income among the subordinate sectors of the colonial Río de la Plata.

This article examines Argentine relations with multilateral agencies and bankers during the first years of the last military dictatorship. It begins with an overview of relations and the external situation before the rise of the military and why a new economic team sought and restored Argentine credit standing. There follows a review of how links with the U.S. Treasury and international institutions lost significance and how cross-country financial intermediation, carried out mainly by leading state banks, gave foreign bankers a key role in the financing of Argentina’s foreign exchange needs. It also emphasises explicit and underlying motivations in the behaviour and policies of all actors involved and offers an evaluation of former Minister Martínez de Hoz’s efforts to justify these policies in the early 1980s.

Labour market transformation and inequality were fundamental aspects in the transition to the industrialisation. This article reconstructs the Barcelona’s area economic structure across the 18th and 19th centuries through the Marriage Licences of the Barcelona’s Cathedral. These documents registered a proportional tax paid by the spouses’ according to their occupational and social status. Since 1780, an important decrease in the primary sector and an increase in the secondary and tertiary sectors are observed. Inequality between economic sectors rose and also within the secondary sector (textile) due to the proletarianization of the workers. Conversely, there was not an increase in inequality in the primary sector while it decreased in the tertiary sector.

After the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia the issue of how to develop a backward economy towards a socialist society took pre-eminence. The relationship between agriculture and industry was one of the key issues. In this respect, the Left Opposition argued in favour of a Big Push for industrialisation financed through the exploitation of the peasantry, while the Right Deviation defended adjusting industrial growth to the development of the agricultural surplus. The First 5-Year Plan meant the complete victory of one of these positions. Unfortunately, all discussions were banned subsequently, the leading figures of these two factions were expelled from the Party and many of them executed. Yet, this problem was of the utmost importance for underdeveloped countries, as Development Economics was to discover 25 years later. This new branch of Economics would have benefitted greatly from the lessons of the Soviet experience regarding industrialisation, as well as from the theoretical discussions surrounding it.

The monetary policies of the decade studied had a direct influence on the evolution of real wages in Ecuador. The gold standard brought with it the increase in real wages until 1932. In February 1932, the Ecuadorian Government decided to abolish the gold standard which, together with a heavy public expenditure, produced a significant increase in money supply causing high levels of inflation. The evolution of real wages in Ecuador is similar to the evolution registered in Latin America in two important aspects: in both cases an upward trend in real wages can be observed once the international crisis began; after the increase in the purchasing power of wages, there is a decline. This study is the first research trying to understand the impact of the Great Depression in Ecuador through the evolution of real wages.