In this article I examine the history of the Mexican Stock Exchange from the end of the Revolution until 1975, under the hypothesis that it did not carry out its pertinent functions in corporate financing but was rather an economic and political instrument of the government. Due to state intervention and the deficient definition of property rights, its functioning was completely anomalous except during this period. The article represents a first step in the study of the role of the stock exchange in Latin American corporatist economic models.

This paper presents the course taken by the Cuban economy from the early twentieth century until the outbreak of the Revolution, seen from the perspective of what happened in the stock market. I have therefore prepared an index of Havana Stock Exchange listings which shows strong dependence on what happened in the sugar market, particularly in sugar exports. However, my research highlights the weakness of this institution, conceived more as an instrument of speculative enrichment rather than one of financing, the evolution of which reveals the fragility of the Cuban economy and particularly the poor development of its capital markets.

This paper presents the first results of our most recent research on the Bilbao Stock Exchange (BSE) from its foundation in 1890 up to the Spanish Civil War. We examine the origin of the Exchange and follow its evolution over the first half-century of existence. To this end we introduce some of the stock exchange indexes we have calculated for Bilbao and put them into comparative perspective with the existing series on general economic and industrial activity and the indexes for other Spanish exchanges for the period considered. These comparisons show Bilbao’s evolution from a public debt-dominated market to an industrial exchange very much tied to regional development. Finally, we contrast the degree of financial market integration associated with the existing Spanish exchange indexes. Our analysis finds strong support for considering the BSE index as an industrial index and little evidence of capital market integration between the principal Spanish exchanges before the 1920s.