The institutional changes which emerged from the liberal revolution of Western Europe were beneficial for economic growth. Equality before die law, the simplification of the judiciary, the defining of clearer property rights, and the opening of the market all contributed to a rapid approximation of the expected improvements in private returns with die increase in social returns. This article examines the institutional changes that took place in nineteenth century Spain, and concludes that deficiencies in the carrying out of the reforms produced smaller gains for economic growth than might have been expected.

In this paper we build a general index of retail prices for the city of Santander, using the information from the «Mercurial» during the first half of 19th century, a period we do not have much information about This index for the Cantabrian capital is compared to the Reher-Ballesteros index. The hypothesis is that the Santander index has a different profile to the Reher-Ballesteros one due to two reasons —its composition is more varied and it describes a peripheral area. The uselfulness of local documentation for this kind of research is equally shown.

This article analyses the industrial activity of the French automobile company Renault during its first two decades in Spain. A first section examines the negotiations which concluded in the concession of the Spanish license and the establishment of a Spanish licensee society (FASA). A second part analyses the early years of FASA, in which it experienced a sustained growth overshadowed by product quality and management problems. We show how FASA's main phase of expansion coincided with the French head office's control, effective from 1964 on. The last part of the article summarizes some of the factors contributing to the success of Renault in Spain: such as adapting to local market conditions, establishing a certain degree of freedom in management and a more flexible export policy.

Numerous archival documents show how the suspension of payments by Philip II, in September 1575, on the contracts with Genoese bankers (asientos) induced a freeze of the domestic credit market in Castile through the bankers’ intermediation for asientos and the credit interconnections. Commercial fairs stopped, banks failed and trade suffered while the king granted legal protection to the Genoese bankers. The evidence strikingly confirms that by his strategy, Philip II was able to remove the de facto ceiling on the domestic debt (juros) imposed by the fixed revenue commitment of the Castilian cities in the Cortes. The agreement with the bankers was signed in December 1577 immediately after the cities had agreed to the doubling of their commitment.

The power of the elites became the dominant explanation of the extension of the franchise and expansion of the provision of public services. Peru from 1876 to 1940 presents a contrasting case. Although restricting political participation through literacy requirements, Peru saw an increase in literacy and schooling. Nevertheless, the relative power of the national and local elites articulated the national policies resulting in unequal provision of education. Constrained political access of the economic minority, the indigenous population, translated into a widening gap in terms of educational attainment.

This paper uses the theoretical and empirical contributions of recent international literature on the determinants of long run economic growth to explain the historical origin of the enormous regional economic inequalities which characterize Colombia. The results indicate that geography and culture are not direct determinants of differences in regional per capita income. Nevertheless, geography did play a central but indirect role through its influence on settlement patterns during the colonial period. Although econometric estimations indicate that the colonial legacy influenced contemporary differences in regional income, it is not clear if this effect operates via the institutions or human capital.

This paper presents a data series on social expenditure in Portugal for the period 1938-2003. The series was built with the aim of identifying and characterizing the most significant phases in the process leading up to the current welfare state system in this country. The establishment of a social insurance (Previdência) in 1935 was one of the founding pillars of the Estado Novo (New State). Reforms to Social Welfare (Previdência Social) in 1962, while in the full throes of the New State, policy measures taken after the revolution of 1974 and a new orientation for social policy following the accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC) in the mid-1980s brought about significant transformations in the institutional organizational structure that provided welfare and conferred social rights in Portugal. To understand this process, knowledge is needed of the transformations to the institutional structures governing the organizations that provided welfare, welfare coverage in terms of the type of benefit and the population entitled to social risk protection, the magnitude of spending on benefits associated with these risks, as well as how benefits were allocated between the institutions. We built a data series for the period 1938-1980, which can then be matched to data already published in the OECD Social Expenditure Database from 1980 onwards. As a result, a consistent series for social expenditure from 1938 to 2003 was obtained. The methodology used to create the series enabled us to measure the impact of the variation in population coverage for social risks and the average generosity of benefits on the relative share of social expenditure in GDP. We present an interpretive reading for the full period, covering the New State and the Democracy from 1974, of the process of building the welfare state in Portugal.

En este trabajo se analizan las características del comercio en el siglo XVI de uno de los principales colorantes empleados en la industria pañera: el pastel. Dicho producto fue una de las más principales mercancías intercambiadas durante fines de la Edad Media y principios de la Moderna. En dicho tráfico sus mayores participantes en toda Europa fueron los mercaderes españoles, y en especial los burgaleses. En el trabajo se reconstruye dicho comercio en España a partir de los datos de unos 2.000 asientos de compra venta de pastel procedentes de diversos Libros de Cuentas Mercantiles. Dichas cifras permiten presentar un completo panorama de la geografía de la industria pañera española durante el siglo XVI: su jerarquización según su importancia económica, sus características productivas, la diferenciación entre los centros rurales y los urbanos, las redes de comercialización, etc.

This paper discusses the economic performance of three Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) from a comparative perspective, using as a benchmark a group of four developed countries (France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States). The focus is on the relative performance within the region and between the Latin American countries and the developed countries in the period 1900–1980. The paper argues that Argentina and Uruguay benefited from a privileged position in international markets at the beginning of the 20th century and this allowed them to converge. However, they failed to adjust to the major long-run change in the pattern of world trade brought about by World War I and the Great Depression, which implied a persistent decline of their export markets. On the other hand, Brazil, after having been much less successful until 1930, grew at higher rates thereafter based on rapid structural change and the building up of competitive advantages in new industrial sectors. The more vigorous Brazilian policy for industrialization and export diversification may explain why Brazil succeeded in changing its pattern of specialization, while Argentina and Uruguay were locked in to the old pattern. A typology of convergence regimes is suggested based on the growth experience of these countries.

In this article we propose the construction of Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) from demographical and educative variables, applied to Spanish regions and provinces in the European context between 1860 and 1930. Our results show an unequal but extensive improvement of PQLI, which was superior to the one experimented in per capita product in this period. Morover, the evolution of PQLI spacial disparities suggests some parallels with Italian case and the necessity to be careful about the relationships between economic growth and well-being.

This paper provides a reconstruction of the yearly values of Mexico's foreign trade within the period 1870–1929, the era of liberal capitalism. It uses the Mexican official statistics as well as those published by Mexico's main trading partners: the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. The article assesses de quality and consistency of the Mexican sources and applies explicit criteria to rectify the official figures and to fill the gaps in the available information. It also proposes a new breakdown of trade values, which allows distinguishing between commodity trade and specie movements. As a result, the article provides widi complete annual series of commodity trade and specie flows, as well as a yearly estimate of the trade balance throughout the period.

The Spanish Empire in America —so envied by other countries— has never been regarded by economic historians as an unmixed blessing. For Hamilton, the precious metals from the Americas caused a parallel rise in prices and wages, reducing industrial investment and thus aborting the development of capitalism. For Vilar, a critic of that view, the Empire, as «the supreme phase of feudalism», led to a primitive accumulation of capital responsible for freezing structures inhibiting to capitalism. Wallerstein recognised that America was essential for the conversion of Spain into a semi-periphery of the world market1. To that can be added other less general but equally negative approaches concerning the effects of emigration or of American treasure, seen by many as contributing to an absolutism powerful enough to impose a foreign policy alien to the interests of the country and highly damaging to the Spanish economy, and to that of Castile in particular.

A very low demand elasticity for wheat –the so-called King's Law– is one of the most commonly accepted assumptions made by cliometricians. But there is little and contradictory evidence to contrast this. In fact, Robert Fogel's estimates confirm the hypothesis whereas Karl Gunnar Persson's reject it. The aim of this article is to shed new light into this debate through an improved version of Fogel's procedure, using price and production data for several Western European countries in the Premodern Age. The results confirm Persson's estimate.

Replying to Rafael Dobado-González’s article on living standards in Spanish America during the colonial period, we discuss the methodology and evidence published in Arroyo Abad, Davis, and van Zanden (2012).

The main objective of this research has been to identify the determinants of durable and semi-durable goods' consumption in Castile between 1750 and 1850. These patterns of family consumption are very different and heterogeneous. It is necessary to distinguish those related with economic variables —family rent and its components (wages and taxes, for example)— and those related to the economic evolution, changes in rent distribution, credit faculties, inflation and other aspects of cultural, social and institutional character. First of all, I will explain some critical aspects on the probate inventories, the criteria adopted in their selection and the validity of the sample. An econometric approach that allows to identify the elements that had influenced in the consumption of durable and semi-durable goods has been employed.

This paper analyses the demographic decline experienced by Spain's 84 main mountainous districts, which cover more than 20 per cent of the national surface and had 15 per cent of the country's total population in 1860. In Spain, mountain depopulation took place later than in other, more advanced European countries. However, once it started, the process was very intense in comparative perspective. Depopulation became a general phenomenon during the second half of the twentieth century as a consequence of significant shortcomings in rural welfare – these shortcomings were related in turn to low degrees of economic diversification and high levels of pertalty on the access to basic equipment and services. Furthermore, depopulation acted as a mechanism for economic selection because it contributed to the disappearance of the traditional peasant economy and the «default» emergence of more diversified patterns.

Studies of the economic relations between Great Britain and its colonies, such as Hopkins (1988) and O'Brien (1988), have revitalised controversy about the relevance of economic factors in the history of imperialism. Some have denigrated the relevance of the Hobson-Lenin thesis that capitalists required new overseas investment opportunities to postpone the collapse of capitalism, and the argument that colonies were a paying proposition. This article assesses the economic relations between the Netherlands and its colony Indonesia. It aims to raise the profile of this connexion in the controversy mentioned above, and to explore whether and to what extent the economic relationship may be crucial to explaining «metropolitan» economic development and «peripheral» underdevelopment.

The literature on Anglo-South American trade during the first half of the 19th century has taken British exports for granted. There are no specific considerations of textile exports, which were the backbone of British trade to the continent. Accordingly, when explaining the growth of British exports, historians have paid tribute solely to economic developments in South America. Important developments taking place in Britain have long been neglected. This paper provides the first account of the impact that improvements in the packing of textiles to protect against seawater damages had on British exports to distant markets, focusing on the particular markets of Chile and the River Plate c.1810-1859.

In 2010 Spain ranked second among EU-15 countries in the manufacture of passenger cars; however, in 1950 the country’s car production had been purely symbolic. Taking as its starting point the trajectories of the enterprises that have shaped the auto industry in Spain, this study explores the sector’s process of development within the interpretative framework proposed by Alfred D. Chandler in Scale and Scope. Until the mid-1970s, SEAT and FASA-Renault, the sector’s first-movers, maintained their position as industry leaders. The entry of Ford and GM in the 1970s was to restructure the industry as it shifted its focus towards exportation to the European Economic Community. Both market share and net profits are used as indicators of the evolution of each car maker.

En la primavera y comienzos del verano de 1830, hasta el 3 de julio, fecha de su reembarque para el continente, los barceloneses José Bonaplata —«fabricante privilegiado, por cinco años», como «introductor en España de las máquinas de hilar los estambres, y de los telares mecánicos»— y Juan Rull —«fabricante real», en mérito a haber adoptado «la máquina de pintar indianas»— viajaron por Inglaterra, con el triple objeto de conocer directamente la industria textil del Lancashire, de adquirir maquinaria (por valor de más de 400.000 reaies) y de colocar «en una de las principales fábricas de Manchester, para adiestrarse», a otro joven compatriota apellidado Camps.