In the 1940s, when the governor of Puerto Rico was still appointed by the U.S. president, a large state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector was established. Later, in 1948-1950, the island's first elected government privatised these SOEs. This paper documents both the creation of the SOE sector and its privatisation, and analyses the role played by ideology, political interests and economic concerns in the decision to privatise. Whereas ideological factors might have played a significant role in the building of the SOE sector, the privatisation process was driven by economic factors. In the cement sector, the competing private firm was more efficient and the SOEs in other sectors with no private competitors in the island showed permanent losses.

The article questions the degree of importance that has been attributed to insecurity in the recent analysis of Colombia's lack of development in the 19th century, and of the lack of development in post-independence Latin America generally. The author criticizes their lack of empirical evidence, and their lack of comparative focus, both within the hemisphere and outside it, and offers a series of arguments against their conclusions. His own evidence in the Colombian case indicates that neither «anarchy» nor deficiencies in property rights constituted significant brakes on the development of the country's economy. He also questions the direction of causation in institutionalist explanations.

This study aims to answer whether empirical records confirm the existence of a secular decline in the terms of trade affecting primary producers (the Singer–Prebisch hypothesis). The paper analyses the evolution of the terms of trade for agricultural and food products in the second half of the 20th century. We obtain sixty new real price indices for internationally traded agricultural products. We conclude, from a long-term perspective, that the deterioration in the terms of trade for agricultural and food products was strong and clear in the second half of the last century. In general, less processed products suffered a very heavy fall in their real prices. However, there was no continuous and persistent deterioration in the terms of trade either as a whole or for the great majority of the agricultural and food product groups (with the exception of natural rubber, textile fibres and other raw materials). Rather, this deterioration occurred in stages.

The influence of economic ideas in parliamentary debates has attracted increasing attention in the analysis of the institutionalisation of political economy in the liberal age in the Western world. Within this framework, this paper explores a particular case: the relevance of economic ideas and the role of economists in the debates that took place in the Spanish Parliament in 1869 following the bill issued by the Minister of Finance Figuerola to establish a tax on personal incomes. Economic ideas and parliamentarian economists played a significant role in the design of the income tax as a key tool to modernise Spain's tax system, and in the subsequent parliamentary discussions.

This article deals with the relations between taxation and prices levels in seventeenth century Castile through an analysis of the influence of royal and municipal taxes on the retail prices of cheap wine in Madrid between 1606 and 1700. First part describes the taxes levied on cheap wine by the Castilian Crown and the town council in Madrid. Both kinds of taxes provided the Royal and the City Treasuries with the most important part of their tax revenues. Second part analyzes how the Royal and the city authorities estimated the monetary value of the taxes and excises levied on this beverage. Lastly, third part shows that the burden of the royal and municipal taxes levied on a litre of cheap wine rose during the period. If in 1606-10 both types of taxes amounted to around 30 per cent of the retail prices of a litre of cheap wine, in the last third of the century this percentage had risen to 60-65 per cent.