Using data from two national surveys (ENSA, 2000; ENSANUT, 2006) we assess the evolution of biological standards of living of the Mexican population born during the second half of the 20th century. Our results show that there was an improvement in living standards reflected in an increase in stature, but this amelioration was limited. We observe differences across socio-economic strata, across educational levels, and between men and women. Persistent structural inequality has been byproduct of a system of security and social protection that was limited, segmented and hampered the potentially positive effects of social-welfare policies. We corroborate the relatively modest improvement in heights by comparing outcomes in Mexico with other Latin American countries.

This article verifies the existence of three different and complementary geographies in the 1790–1830 period, a stage in the Catalan industrialization process that has deserved little attention among historians. The first one, of manual spinning by means of an improved jenny –locally named bergadana– in inner Catalonia; a second one of improved water-frame spinning in Manresa and the surrounding villages; and, finally, a third one of wood mule-jenny in Barcelona and some towns of the seaside district of the Maresme. These three areas were characterized by using distinctive power sources and producing different types of thread; they also had different wage levels; but they were complementary until the 1830's when the introduction of new mechanical instruments required important and innovative organization changes. The article ends with two analitical case studies: Salient as a typical example of manual spinning, and Manresa as a case of water frame spinning.

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.

Recently, new research has challenged the traditional narrative; Spain did not suffer from a ruler that threatened his subjects’ property with excessive taxes and forced loans. Instead, Spanish economic development was held back by decentralised and non-predatory governance, unable to solve the coordination problems blocking the way to more integrated markets. Through the analysis of the governance and loan portfolios of an ecclesiastical order, this paper examines the extent to which mortgage credit markets were fragmented in early modern Spain. This order not only collected resources that it subsequently lent but also pooled them. Indeed, it developed into a nationally integrated organisation able to offer everything from small loans to farmers to substantial amounts to the king and the Madrid elite.

This article makes the first systematic attempt to analyse quantitatively the evolution of Spanish housing markets from 1904 to 1934, a period of dramatic changes in housing demand as a consequence of substantial income and demographic growth. In order to do so, we collect a new database on houses sold and their prices using data from the Registrar's Yearbooks. Furthermore, we construct a new hedonic index of real housing prices for Spain and its provinces. To our surprise, we found that real housing prices rose slightly over the entire period and, hence, that housing supply responded effectively to new demand for housing.

Modern textile manufacture appeared early in Mexico and grew continuously through the 19th century. Yet, it did not translate into a successful industrialization process as a result of naturally endowed high transportation costs and institutional frailty: a concept that encompasses institutional uncertainty, weakness and fragmentation. Institutional frailty generated a captured tariff policy that gave low effective protection to the industry, a backward financial market that limited resources available for industrial growth, and increased transportation costs through inter-state tariff barriers. High transportation costs fragmented the national market and as a result, the textile industry grew geographically dispersed.

Después de que Inglaterra comenzara a finales del siglo xviii lo que llegó a ser conocido como la Primera Revolución Industrial, la tecnología industrial se difundió rápidamente por las naciones del Atlántico Norte. A los cincuenta años de haberse iniciado la industrialización en Gran Bretaña, el sistema fabril se había extendido por Europa Occidental y Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, Latinoamérica se quedó atrás. No fue hasta el siglo xx cuando la manufactura comenzó a dirigir las economías latinoamericanas y cuando las sociedades agrarias se transformaron en sociedades industriales.

This paper analyzes the Spanish industrial product during the period between the Spanish Civil War and the stabilization plan of 1959, whith special attention to the 1940's.

The essay carries out a revision of the Industrial Production Index, developed by Albert Carreras. The new industrial production index is made by breaking down the aggregate, in such a way that an index for each sector can be compiled, allowing for the changes in the productive structure of the Spanish industry of the period.

In this paper I use historical data to analyze the relationship between crises and growth in Latin America. I calculate by how much the region's GDP per capita has been reduced as a consequence of the recu- rrence of external crises. I also analyze the determinants of major balan- ce of payments crises. The main conclusion is that it is unlikely that Latin America will, on average, experience a major improvement in long run growth in the future. It is possible that some countries will make progress in catching up with the advanced nations. This, however, will not be the norm; most Latin American countries are likely to fall further behind in relation to the Asian countries and other emerging nations. Not everything, however, is grim. My analysis also suggests that fewer Latin America countries will be subject to the type of catastrophic crises that affected the region in the past. Latin America's future will be one of «No crises and very modest growth».

The impact that the new energy source, electricity, had on the economic growth of a number of countries –USA, UK, France, Italy, Spain and Canada– characterised by their different coal endowments is the principal objective of this article. The new energy, amongst its other advantages, reduced the dependence on natural resources of coal as it could be generated out of different primary energies: namely water or coal. In order to assess the importance of this reduced dependence, a coal-and-electricity energy database is presented for all six countries. We show that the relative prices electricity-coal were low in countries with poor coal endowments, and we find that there was a negative relationship between relative prices electricity-coal and economic growth. Moreover, there was a relationship between the industrial electrification process in countries with no coal deposits and their investment process, their labour productivity increase, their economic and manufacturing industry growth, and the structural change they underwent.

This paper proposes a methodology for quantifying the territorial impact on population distribution of the railway. The central hypothesis is that access to railway services provides the best-connected areas with a long-term comparative advantage over others that are less accessible. Carrying out a historical analysis and providing comparable data at the municipal level allows us to determine the extent to which the railway has fostered the concentration of population within its immediate surroundings. The case study presented here is that of Spain between 1900 and 2001, but the same methodology could equally be applied to any other country for which the required data are available. In this case, key data included a Geographic Information System with information about both the development of the railway network and census data relating to total population at the municipal level. The results obtained suggest the relevance of this methodology, which makes it possible to identify the periods and areas in which this influence was most significant.

The insurance industry in modern Spanish history has not practically yet been studied, notwithstanding die considerable significance of this financial activity which is not only a reflection of economic development but also in itself motive power thereof. It may also be used as an indicator of the evolution of other sectors since, in the capitalist system everything of value is always insured. This paper is intended as a first approach to the insurance industry in Spain from 1800 to 1934 and as such it has been given a maximum of generality so as to present a framework which may be used for further investigation.

The quantification of the American remittances is tended to distinguish among wealth public and private. Fruit of this are some wrong results, above all in the XVII century. The present article study the precious metals import for the Royal Estate. It is intended to show that the remittances with which counted the Wreath were more important than what traditionally it has been considered. The cause of its infravaloration resides in a wrong analysis of the source of used official character. To know which was the volume of precious metals with which counted the Royal Estate is a resolutive topic to understand the evolution of the credit of the Wreath and the relationships that maintained with the foreign bankers.

Small landownership had an outstanding role in determining the process of viticultural specialization that some well-defined territories known as “comarcas” experienced in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Catalonia. The net product these small landholdings yielded was not enough to safeguard the reproduction of the peasant family units closely linked to those small areas devoted to vineyards. It is for this reason that this article analyzes the different strategies these families developed in order to guarantee their reproduction, either as consumption or production units.

Después de una larga serie de esfuerzos acumulativos, los historiadores del Pensamiento Económico se han puesto sustancialmente de acuerdo sobre cuáles han sido los principales aportes de la escolástica española a la ciencia económica. Radican éstos en el desarrollo de la teoría del valor y del precio, la integración de la teoría monetaria en la teoría general de los precios, la teoría cuantitativa del dinero, una interesante teoría de los cambios, la doctrina general del interés y el análisis del sistema tributario. Se trata de ideas que surgieron en la consideración de las grandes cuestiones fundamentales del justo precio, de la usura y de los tributos.

This paper studies the figure of «Factor General del rey» in the organization and work of the Royal Finances of Castilla between 1627 and 1644, under the reformist government of the Count-Duke of Olivares. During these years, the Factor General was Bartolomé Spinola, one of the most importante Genoese bankers of Phillip IV. This article analyses the strategy of Royal Finances in the financial market during the early seventeenth century, and the role played by the most important bankers. To begin with, I examine why the Royal Finances needed a Factor General. At this moment, the Crown was establishing a system where the policy was established by experts. The presence of financiers in the court of Madrid grew as much as to influence economic policy. Later afterwards, I explain who Bartolomé Spinola was and how he got to become the main important banker, and then the Factor General. Drawing upon the experience and understanding he gained from his activities in the financial markets as a private banker, he could influence the direction of the political economy of the Spanish Empire. Finally, I analyse briefly some of the functions of the Factor General in the financing of the Crown's expenses, and his intervention in the problems relative to the vellon coinage.

According to historiography, deflation was one of the main features of early 19th century Spanish economy. However, studies that quantify the intensity of this deflation in relation to the experiences in other countries are lacking. For this reason, the purpose of the paper is the construction and the interpretation of a Laspeyres index of consumer prices in Barcelona for the years 1775–1844. The paper is divided into two sections. The first part describes the method used to construct the index. The second section compares the evolution of Spanish prices with other international cases.

Latin America had the highest tariffs in the world before 1914; Asia had the lowest. Heavily protected Latin America also boasted some of the most explosive belle époque growth, while open Asia registered some of the least. What brought the two regions to the opposite ends of the tariff policy spectrum? We find that limits to Asian tariff policy autonomy may have lowered tariffs substantially there, but by themselves they cannot explain why Asian tariffs were so much lower than the Latin American tariffs before 1914; that natural barriers, domestic political economy and strategic tariff policy seems to have contributed much to the difference and that the origins of Asian post-World War 2 import-substitution policies seem to lie in the interwar years when Asian tariff levels caught up with those of Latin America.

Resulta, sin duda, excesivamente atrevido el tratar de esbozar la coyuntura de la minería y la metalurgia europeas durante más de cinco siglos. La variabilidad de la producción y las vacilaciones de la demanda, impuestas por razones í, tecnológicas y económicas, hacen la empresa muy difícil. Un recurso, casi imprescindible, es el de soslayar la producción de aquellos metales menos significativos, a la vez que intentar ofrecer una perspectiva general que recoja los grandes trazos de la coyuntura.

This article presents three new annual indices of industrial output for Andalusia, Catalonia and the Basque Country between 1830 and 1975. The comparative analysis, the first to include the Basque Country, allows to specify the main tendencies of growth and structural change in the regions studied, two of them pioneers of the Spanish industrialization, Andalusia clearly left behind. The analysis highlights as well the changes operated in the composition of their respective industrial products and, with them, the different regional paths, going from specialization to the manufacturing diversification, followed during the 19th and 20th centuries.