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.

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.

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.

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 author proposes a method of comparing different levels of factor market integration in Spain. This method consists of standarizing four indicators about labor market (L), land market (T1 y T2) and capital market (K) to build an composit indicator. This permits us to make some generalizations concerning the level of market integration in northern Spain.

Wood has always been and will continue being a material used bay man in thousands of different ways, but it has barely received the attention it descrves from economic historians. This article aims to show the great variety of economic problems related to wood as well as to illustrate the need to carry out further research on this matter. Forest, industrial and commercial aspects of wood in Spain from mid-XIX to mid-XX century, taking into account the changes produced in wood use and in the evolution of international markets, are analysed. The most important conclusions of die study include die «lumbering» of Spanish forest production, the increase and spread of sawmills, the complementing of national production with imported timber and die self-sufficient descapitalisation of die autharchic years.

This article considers the importance of sugar in the Cuban economy in the first twelve years after the Revolution. Two major emphases in policy can be identified. From 1959 the revolutionary leaders attempted to diversify away from sugar, but with only limited success. By 1970 the failure of this policy was evident and a second approach, which placed sugar in the forefront of economy policy, was introduced.

El análisis de una cuestión tan importante como es la evolución del poder adquisitivo de los trabajadores durante el período franquista tropieza con graves dificultades debido a la inexistencia de series estadísticas continuas y suficientemente fiables acerca de los niveles salariales prevalecientes en dichos años. El Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) no inició hasta 1963 la elaboración de una Encuesta de Salarios dirigida a establecimientos seleccionados por muestreo aleatorio. Aunque la nueva encuesta tenía una cobertura limi tada y adolecía de diversos problemas metodológicos (Serrano y Malo de Molina, 1979: 331–346; Lorente, 1982), supuso una mejora muy importante respecto a la situación anterior en que la única información oficial disponible se limitó a unos datos de ganancias obtenidos por el INE desde 1953, que constituyen el precedente inmediato de la Encuesta de Salarios mencionada, y unos datos de «tarifas salariales» publicados por el mismo Instituto.

In this paper we revive an old explanation for Gresham's law that rests on the trafficking of coins by moneychangers. Focusing on the late Middle Ages, we present material suggesting that moneychangers used their private information on money to make profit through billonnage and arbitrage operations. In both cases their activity led to the partial –sometimes total– disappearance of the undervalued coins.

La Economía Política se incorporó como tal disciplina a los Planes de Estudios de la Universidad española a partir de la Real Cédula de 12 de julio de 1807 (Reforma Caballero), que la incluyó en el noveno año de la Facultad de Leyes. A partir de entonces, con distintas denominaciones, pero-casi siempre con la de Economía Política, esta disciplina ha figurado siempre en los Planes de Estudios de la Universidad española, con la única excepción del decenio absolutista 1824–1833, en el que la Economía se consideró como una «ciencia peligrosa para los jóvenes».

Sabido es que el filósofo inglés Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), a quien se asocia en economía con la teoría de la utilidad, mantuvo intensas relaciones, en diversos momentos de su vida, con España, los españoles y los hispanoame-ricanos. El presente artículo analiza con detalle la obra de Bentham «Libraos de Ultramar», un manuscrito que ha permanecido inédito hasta hoy, y es muy poco conocido. Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria, tal su título original, fue redactado entre 1820 y 1822 y, aunque su mensaje manifiesto es insistir a Ios españoles sobre la conveniencia de la emancipación de sus colonias, tiene un objetivo último bastante diferente; el septuagenario Bentham pretendía Ilamar la atención sobre ciertos peligros que se cernían sobre el régimen liberal en España, derivados especialmente de las deficiencias que, según el inglés, aquejaban a la Constitución de Cádiz de 1812.

Este ensayo es un intento de análisis de la evolución del comercio exterior español durante los siglos XVIII y XIX, que aspira a mostrar su incidencia sobre la evolución general del país y a comparar algunas de las conclusiones obtenidas con algunas de las teorías más extendidas acerca de las interrelaciones entre el sector exterior y la economía en general. Se trata, naturalmente, de una versión muy resumida de un proyecto de investigación en curso, y cualquier demanda de información adicional será atendida.

The frame of this work is the reception that Jovellanos' Informe de Ley Agraria (1795) known in Spain. It is specially focused on the Spanish translation of a conspicuous agronomic work by F. Rozier, a French author. The translation was induced by the Informe and was elaborated by J. Álvarez Guerra. It has been considered as a notorious achievement of the Spanish agronomic movement of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the translator's «Discurso Preliminar» has not already been studied. This «Discurso» included an entire summary of the economic ideas of the French Physiocracy, so it allows us to consider it as a Physiocrat alternative of the Jovellano's Informe. Two different issues are particularly involved by this research: firstly, the influence of Physiocracy in Spain was stronger than it has been recognised; secondly, free trade was consubstantial to the Spanish economic program of the Enlightenment, although always as a minority option.

This paper presents a new dataset of enrolment rates and grade distribution ratios (GDR) in Brazil between 1933 and 2010, in addition to enrolment rates and GDR of Brazilian states from 1955 to 2010. To our knowledge, there are no previous estimates of enrolment rates by states for such a long period in Brazil. Enrolment rates and GDR in northern and north-eastern states were meagre and comparable to the lowest Latin American performers, and even the most advanced Brazilian states lagged behind the early leaders of the region, such as Argentina and Uruguay, until the turn of the century. Given a certain enrolment rate, Brazilian states were expected to present lower GDR compared to Latin American countries on average.

This article documents and interprets the Spanish trade in American cotton which developed between the 1740s and 1790s. Following an analysis of the historiography concerning the trade, it provides data on the quantities imported, the state, ginned or unginned, in which it was imported, its origins in the American empire, the shipping arrangements made for its transport, the charges for its freight and the prices which were paid for it in Spain. It shows the growth of the trade to be related to growing demand for raw cotton during the early stages of Catalan industrialization, the meeting of which was facilitated by the reforms introduced in the Hispanic colonial system.

This paper engages with and aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the role of economic and political elites in inequality dynamics and their reproduction over time. We reconstruct the distribution of wealth employing a sample of wills from the El Colegio de Sonora database covering the period of 1871-1910. We show that the rapid industrialisation and modernisation process that occurred in northern Mexico during the late-19th and early-20th centuries led to a continuous increment in wealth concentration at the top of the distribution. The Gini index measure of 0.58 for the 1871-1885 period rose to 0.80 in 1901-1910. Rather than a natural or «Kuznetsian» inevitability fundamental (kuznetsian) necessity, however, our subsequent analysis of the wills of the upper classes suggests a critical role played by the political economy at the time and highlights the importance of control over natural resources on inequality dynamics.

Socio-natural disasters remain underexplored events in economic history, even though they stress societies in several ways and are known for their relationship with institutional change. In this paper, we explore this issue showing that major earthquakes in Chile have become a window of opportunity for important fiscal reforms. Our findings indicate that there are two mechanisms to explain this relationship: first, reconstruction demands greater state expenditure and intervention; and second, the emergence of narratives that justify these reforms, such as patriotism and solidarity. However, data show that in the case of Chile, changes following disasters have had little impact on the overall tax structure of the country, and the historical preference for indirect taxes has been maintained, with limited power to impose taxes on high-income groups.

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.

This paper estimates original yields for five grains in thirty-three provinces of Spain in the mid-18th century. We observe a strong heterogeneity between the provinces with yields being considerably higher in the north of the country than in the south-east. Although average yields in Spain were below those in other countries of north-western Europe, the provinces in the north achieved yields not far behind the most advanced agricultural regions of the world. The heterogeneity of yields across Spain can be explained by the different climatic conditions in each province. Although all the provinces improved their yields in the long term, the differences between the provinces remained stable until the modernisation of Spanish agriculture around the mid-20th century.

This article is a novel study on previously unedited data regarding employment in the Spanish Railway sector between the years 1893–1935. The Annual data published by the well know Annals of the Spanish Railways have been closely scrutinised and checked against document referring to the two major companies: Norte y MZA. The resulting findings show the dynamic nature of this labour market! Between 1893 and 1935 employment figures tripled. The documents examined further reveal the existence of a labour market which was quite diverse and consisted of numerous different segments.