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.

Are laws that protect minority investors a necessary condition for the development of stock markets? This paper attempts to answer this question using data on the origins of the corporate sector in Chile to construct an empirical analysis of the contractual provisions included in charters of corporations in the 19th century. Our findings indicate that, even though corporate law at the time was silent with respect to governance rules and investor protection, a significant number of corporations were created and their shares traded. The empirical analysis of the corporate charters reveals that these contracts frequently included provisions favourable to outside investors and the use of these provisions is consistent with the predictions of a simple agency model.

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.

This article studies the possible effect that education may have upon entrepreneurial success. It uses two data bases, one for Spanish, the other for English entrepreneurs. By means of statistical and econometric analysis, we examine the effects on entrepreneurial behaviour of a series of variables, several relating to education. We compare the Spanish with the English sample. The main conclusions are: education indeed has a considerable bearing upon entrepreneurial success; this bearing is much more evident in the English than in the Spanish samples; both educational systems are quite different; and, lastly, family income seems to have little effect either on entrepreneurial success or on the studies of future entrepreneurs.

Global agro-food trade grew strongly during the first globalisation. The increase in demand, the fall in trade costs, liberal policies and technological advances explain this expansion in trade. Within this context, this study analyses the formation and evolution of the international market of a special product: meat. It is a peculiar product because it is perishable. Furthermore, it is important to point out that the increase in its trade was based mostly on the strong demand in the United Kingdom, which acquired an almost monopsonist position, and also on the diffusion of mechanical refrigeration. This enabled the countries of the Río de la Plata, particularly Argentina, together with Australia and New Zealand to become world leaders in meat exports.

Challenging current ideas in mainstream scholarship on differences between female labour force participation in southern and north-western Europe and their impact on economic development, this article shows that in Portugal, neither marriage nor widowhood prevented women from participating in the labour market of mid-eighteenth-century. Our research demonstrates that marriage provided women with the resources they needed to work in various capacities in all economic sectors.

This article also argues that single Portuguese women had an incentive to work and did so mostly as wage earners. Finally, the comparison of our dataset on female occupations from tax records with other European cases calls for a revision of the literature and the development of a more nuanced picture of the north-south divide.

We assess the numeracy (age heaping) of religious minorities, particularly Jews, and other defendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and compare it with the general Iberian population. Our database includes 13,000 individuals who took part in Inquisition trials, and 17,000 individuals recorded in censuses and parish registers who serve as a control group. We thoroughly discuss the representativeness of our samples for the populations we aim to capture. Our results point at a substantial numeracy advantage of the Judaism-accused over the Catholic majority. Furthermore, Catholic priests and other groups of the religious elite who were occasional targets of the Inquisition had a similarly high level of numeracy.

In 1821 Mexico achieved its independence from Spain. What happened in the following 50 years has become a field of dispute for economic historians. The lack of reliable quantitative information in many fields of economic activity has led to contrasting interpretations, none of which has been accepted as definitive. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the yearly values of Mexico’s foreign trade in that period, with the purpose of providing elements to start filling this significant gap in Mexico’s historiography. It relies on official trade statistics and consular reports from Mexico’s main trading partners. It provides new series of imports and (commodity and specie) exports, and a provisional view of the balance of trade for most of the 1821-1870 period.

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.

No sé si el lector de esta polémica habrá obtenido alguna satisfacción intelectual de su lectura. Confío, eso sí, que habrá podido valorar la validez de los datos y argumentos de una y otro. Reconozco que la respuesta de Antolín a mis objeciones me ha producido una cierta perplejidad. Contiene, en primer lugar, buen número de consideraciones —algunas de ellas interesantes— que nada tienen que ver con las objeciones que yo planteaba. Cuando se centra en ellas cae, a mi entender, en cierta incoherencia o, simplemente, elude presentar una réplica sólida. A fin de no aburrir más al inocente lector voy a presentar tan sólo tres puntualizaciones sobre los puntos en discordia y dos breves comentarios de alcance más amplio.

Although only recently the positive performance of the landlords in the Spanish agricultural growth has been standed up, we know relatively little about the participation of the landed aristocraty in these changes. Through the analysis of the administation, the accounting, investments and strategies of some aristocratic families, the article emphasizes the slowness and very often failure of some transformations. The work shows that nor mental factors neither the scarcity of resources and opportunities explain these failures. Instead it is pointed out their incapacity in creating an efficient organization which could solve, at die same time, the problems of a scattered inheritance and the ambiguities of formal property rights.

The literature on internationalisation processes in family businesses has boomed with the emergence of new approaches and different perspectives. One of these schemes analyses the so-called born-again global firms, mostly technology companies, which experienced an internationalisation process after one or more serious incidents affecting it. The case of Ines Rosales extends the frontier of the meaning of a global born-again firm to firms in industries and traditional products. One of its most striking aspects is that the flagship product is centennial and based on basic ingredients. In addition, the production process of the firm mix production by hand and mechanised developments. Inés Rosales shows the ability of a family Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) in a process of internationalisation even in culturally distant markets through the traditional cake of olive oil.

An attempt is made to describe main developments of Aragonese agriculture, distinguishing two different periods separated by the agricultural depression which occurred at the end of the 19th century. The main part of the article is dedicated to the first third of the 20th century, with special attention to the importance that technological change had on labour and land productivity.

Los cambios que tuvieron lugar en las economías de los países occidentales desde los últimos años del siglo xix hasta el primer tercio del xx han venido asimilándose por la literatura reciente a la aceleración de la productividad de los factores producida por la rápida incorporación de nuevas tecnologías y cambios en los sistemas de organización de las empresas. Una de las principales nuevas tecnologías que contribuyeron a esta aceleración fue la incorporación y rápida expansión de la electricidad en el proceso productivo.

La interpretación tradicional de la agricultura española considera que durante medio siglo antes de la guerra civil hubo pocos cambios en la productividad de los factores de producción. Además, la falta de cambios en la agricultura se ha considerado muchas veces, junto con los bajos niveles de vida de muchos productores y una demanda doméstica insuficiente para estimular la producción industrial, como un círculo vicioso del «estancamiento agrícola». Las causas principales de la baja productividad en el sector agrario han sido atribuidas a problemas estructurales, como el latifundio y el minifundio, y a los inadecuados métodos de cultivo, resultado de inversiones de capital insuficientes.

This note is a first aproximation to the evolution of wages in a catalan cotton firm. From the firm sources it has been made a male and female wages indexes. The main conclusions are the relative wage stability up World War I, the change in die evolution from die war, the sexual diferentiation of wages and the different evolution between bodi indexes.

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.

We present the yearly evolution of the Spanish income velocity of money (M2) and we explain its behavior from 1850 to 2000. The Spanish income velocity of money displays a downward trend until 1973 and shows the expected U-shaped pattern at the end of the twentieth century. An international comparison shows how the Spanish trend change occurs with a lag due to the late industrialization. We estimate the determinants of the velocity—the inverse of the demand for money—for the period 1850–1997. A cointegration analysis and an error correction model investigate the importance of the institutional variables in explaining the long-run behavior of the income velocity of money in Spain. The findings reveal a greater stability in the long-run velocity model when the institutional variables are considered.

The degree of development of Spanish agriculture at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of XX is a controversial issue. In this respect the study of the integration of the domestic market could provide new evidence since the degree of the market integration can be considered an indicator of economic development. By using regional wheat prices this paper analyzes the Spanish market integration between 1891 and 1905. With this aim in mind we employ the usual cointegration approach as well as an alternative method based on spectral analysis that allows taking into consideration the existence of no synchronized cycles.

This paper analyses the role of Mompox in New Granada's interregional trade during the late colonial period. It focuses on the value, structure and destination of exports of domestic goods from Mompox to markets on the Atlantic and the Andes. By unearthing unexplored sources, this paper provides evidence that will help to understand, indirectly, some issues such as the nature and timing of economic growth, the degree of regional specialisation and, above all, the role of inland ports in the economic geography of the viceroyalty. The paper contends, first, that the region experienced a boom–bust cycle during the late colonial period. The export of domestic goods doubled between 1770 and 1800 but subsequently collapsed during the 1802-1809 years. Second, evidence suggests that the region experienced a process of market deepening and widening. Trade flows, then, played a larger role in shaping the economic history of the region than previously thought.