Aggregate estimates of British growth during the classical Industrial Revolution have been reassessed in the past decade and present a significantly revision of earlier views of British growth. Growth was slower dian previously believed and industrial change more localized and with a smaller impact Agricultural improvement and die relative ease with which labour moved to urban industry seems central to the experience. Although industry's impact now seems less than previously believed, industrial cities transformed society because die cotton textile industry expanded to exploit the advantage of its new technology and labour moved to the cities. But while exports expanded the share of industry and caused urbanization, they did not raise per capita income much because competition ensured that the benefits went to consumers. Finally, die specific features of die British industrial revolution seem to provide only weak guide to die growth process elsewhere.

On the eve of the Great Famine (1846–50) Irish incomes were low by west European standards. However, an analysis of Irish diets at the time suggests that poverty was mitigated by a calorific intake that exceeded that of early nineteenth-century England and France. The added physical requirements of farm work in Ireland were not commensurate. The impression of healthy food is corroborated by a comparative analysis of Irish and British heights in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This article develops an empirical model of risk-premium for the Peruvian external debt of the nineteenth century. The model relates the risk-premium to a set of macroe-conomic variables of total indebtedness and liquidity. It explains die success of die Peruvian government in the British financial market, the behavior of die bondholders towards risk, and how they interpreted die changing macroeconomic data as the debt was growing, near the default date. The use of die Principal Components method helps to avoid multicolinearity problems as well as extracting most of the information from the different aggregate variables.

This paper seeks to calculate long term trends of land productivity in Spain, 1752–1930, using for it a practically unknown source in the Spanish historiography, die General Wealth Notebooks (1818–1820).

The conclusion of this study is that during the 19th century agricultural productivity grew substantially in Spain —70 % for the cereal in the sown land and doubled the yield in the vineyard—, contradicting the generally accepted view by historians.

In the 16th and 17th centuries die fiscal system of the Spanish monarchy had been sustained by the resources provided by Castile. In die 18th century the Bourbons undertook a series of reforms to integrate diose territories which did not contribute. So far much research has been done on die new fiscal systems established in the realms of die crown of Aragon, but die impact on die Basque Country and Navarre is less known. The statutory finances of these territories were modified, although they continued to enjoy tax exemption. This paper aims at analysing how such changes materialized in die Kingdom of Navarre.

The most recent contributions on the relevance of the State in the growth of the Spanish economy during the Restoration have remarked the limited significance that public expenditure had in the determination of the national income. This article discusses that opinion concluding that the actual importance of the budget, especially related with industrial output, was underrated. We use econometric methods to capture the consequences of budget different components variations on national output.

This paper offers an interpretation of the budgetary policy of the Spanish governments during the Second Republic, 1931–1936. To judge the fiscal policy of this era, actual budget deficits are compared with estimated full employment deficits, that is, deficits that would have happened under conditions of high income levels, high government revenues, and relatively low expansionary expenditures. Contrary to traditional interpretations, such a comparison shows the 1931–1933 Spanish fiscal policy as relatively interventionist, and reveals a higher degree of social concern of die moderate cabinets of the Second Republic than is hitherto conceded.

Social, and more importantly, cultural conditions are die causal factors that allow us to analyse the interpretation and the traits of the translation of David Ricardo's Principles of political economy and taxation, published in Madrid during the years 1848, 1849 and 1850. These social and cultural factors were economic backwardness, the economics training of the translator, the intellectual environment of Madrid, and the concern about social and political unrest. The result was an interpretation of Ricardo's thought quite different from mat usual in Great Britain, and where the meaning of Ricardian economics was lost.

Alfred Marshall has long been recognized as an important figure in the development of rigorous microeconomic theory. His contributions to the theories of value, demand, supply, distribution and industrial organization have often overshadowed his other, no less significant, contributions to theories of money, business cycles, and international trade. This paper concentrates on Marshall's influence on monetary dieory, which carries forward to this day, and argues diat his theory of money did not arise from his role as an adviser to the British Parliament.

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.

In this note, we present a new point of view of how financial markets worked in nineteenth century in Spain, focussing on die price of money mobility, which is founded on the price of domestic bills of exchange on eight days' sight We reveal the source, then the conceptual framework in the use of the course of the exchange as the price of money mobility. Finally, we present a brief analysis of the course of the exchanges in Barcelona. Some conclusions are pointed out: the price of money mobility is a pivotal concept, since there is no doubt it had to have significant effects over both financial and real economy. High volatility of exchanges affects the financial economy while high values of them affects the real economy.

Technological changes gave Cuba one of the most technically advanced cane sugar industries in the world in the first part of this century. In this paper, we show quantitatively that production techniques in sugar manufacturing, as in many other processing industries, underwent enormous increases in their optimal scales due to the adoption of continuous-processing technologies and mass production. These same continuous-processing technologies were those which heralded the managerial revolution à la Chandler. In Cuba, the large turn-of-the-century sugar enterprise, to take a global perspective, was not the latifundio of antiquity; it was an element of the large industrial enterprise of the twentieth century, and it was a mark of global participation and industrial leadership in the newly transformed techniques of sugar manufacture.

The economic history of the Spanish Second Republic has received a big impulse in the last years, but new research is still required. In the present work we approach the behaviour of the Spanish banking system between 1930 and 1935 on the basis of the new theories on credit rationing. The conclusions support a supply side interpretation of the fall in the avalaible amount of credit.

After pointing out the problems involving the making of historic time series of economic aggregates, the main estimates of Spanish national income are described, indicating shortcomings and disparities. Prof. Prados de la Escosura's work is thoroughly analyzed. Taking into account two more recent works on national income in contemporary Spain, the author stresses the need both to contrast data, methods and findings in any attempt to quantify the past, and to establish checks on the validity of these data.

This essay presents an estimation of regional income, for early 20th Century Cantabria. After a short introduction, die paper presents the major results. Methodological support is set forth in die annex.

Si escribo estas líneas es porque el escrito de Valdaliso me menciona repetidamente acompañado de expresiones tales como «me ha dejado un tanto insatisfecho», «discutible en algunos aspectos», «empobrece[…] las líneas de desarrollo de la disciplina», «diagnóstico no del todo acertado», etcétera. Sin embargo, me resulta difícil responder o justificarme porque no entiendo bien qué es lo que persigue el profesor Valdaliso con este escrito, aparte de hacer una confesión pública de sus preferencias personales en algunas materias relacionadas con la historia empresarial.

La naturaleza metodológica de la Historia Económica como economía aplicada raramente se manifiesta tan evidente como en el campo de la Historia Económica de la empresa. Lo que para la Historia Económica general es un signo de identidad adquirido a lo largo de muchos años, para la Historia Económica de la empresa fue la razón misma de su aparición como disciplina independiente. Hace ya 65 años, la necesidad de ofrecer un campo de «experimentación» para las técnicas de dirección empresarial llevó a Wallace B. Donham, decano de la Escuela Graduada de Comercio de la Universidad de Harvard a establecer en 1927 la cátedra Straus de Historia Económica de la empresa con la idea de que, en sus propias palabras, una figura acádemica distinguida

se uniese al claustro de Harvard para ver si en su Escuela Graduada de Comercio fuese posible poner en marcha un programa de investigación y enseñanza en el campo de la Historia Económica general y de la empresa que estuviese tan íntimamente relacionado con los problemas reales del hombre de empresa que llegase a ser una auténtica contributión social.

En los últimos años se ha renovado en nuestro país el interés por la Historia empresarial, una disciplina que cuenta con una importante tradición historiográfica, especialmente en Estados Unidos. En una coyuntura marcada por la reforma de los planes de estudio, los Departamentos de Historia económica han intentado, con desigual éxito, introducir esa asignatura en la nueva carrera de licenciatura de dirección y administración de empresas. Desde el área de conocimiento de la Historia económica se han organizado algunos Congresos y Cursos de Verano, se ha iniciado un programa de investigación e incluso han aparecido dos artículos, realizados por los profesores Coll, Fraile y Tortella acerca de esta disciplina (Coll, 1991; Coll y Tortella, 1992; Fraile, 1993). En el primero de ellos, Coll realiza un repaso de la teoría de la empresa y traza una panorámica breve de la evolución de esta institución a lo largo de la historia. En el segundo, junto con el profesor Tortella, ofrece un estado de la cuestión y realiza algunas consideraciones sobre la situación de la disciplina en España.

Tradicionalmente la historia de México se ha venido interpretando como un proceso espacialmente homogéneo, sin importantes divisiones regionales e inscrito en una evolución de larga duración, que subrayaba el «desarrollo económico» y la estabilidad sociopolítica del siglo XVIII, frente a la «crisis» y la «anarquía» de la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Esta interpretación enfatizaba el papel de las luchas de independencia como la causa principal de los «males» del México decimonónico: si México como nación no nacía o nacía cansada, hipotecada su economía y fragmentada su geografía a causa de las disensiones entre las élites locales en lucha por el control del poder (centralistas contra federalistas), se debía al alto costo pagado en estas guerras.