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.

Don Quixote, herald of patriotic essences, has been devotedly read and reinvented generation after generation. Likewise, Cervantes and his time have been studied until exhaustion by all kinds of scholars prepared to snatch a key from the grave of the nobleman from La Mancha, which could explain the destiny of Spain. In the following pages, the text will not be interpreted from the point of view of economics. Since the works of Piernas Hurtado to this very year of the celebration of the centenary, a fair amount of essays have been produced from that perspective. An alternative analysis is proposed here which, starting with the School of Salamanca and going through Arbitrismo, Enlightenment and the liberal economic historiography, ends at «the time of Pierre Vilar». At the end of the journey one shouldn't be disappointed at verifying that «all depends on the colour of the glass you look through at this matter». The advances in optics have adjusted the distortions caused by faulty lenses and have hence brought different points of view closer together. Today there is considerable agreement amongst scholars.

The paper analyzes total factor productivity (TFP) growth during the period 1929–1944 and its importance as a source of growth in Mexican manufacturing. The analysis of the industry is done at sector level. The paper task focuses on the estimation of TFP growth, and this is done using Harberger's methodology named the Two Deflator Method (2D), whose main characteristic is the realization that the amount of information required to compute the TFP growth rate is much more manageable compared to traditional methods, besides being a very robust and easily applicable method. In addition, the paper presents an empirical analysis to support the thesis that total factor productivity advance was one of the main causes to explain import substitution and growth in manufacturing during the period 1929–1939.

This article deals with the consumption and marketing of textiles in some Castilian areas during the first decades of the 17th century. The study uses a new documentary source: the 1618 inquiry. Part one describes the main characteristics of this documentary source. The second part analyzes textiles sales according to the fibre the different fabrics were made of. The third part presents some notes on the typology of the textiles sold in the country. This allows us to describe the marketing areas of two highly representative products of the Castilian woollen industry: the Segovian and Andalusian cloth. Finally, in the fourth and last part we have estimated the consumption of textile fabrics by household. This analysis has also been completed with a study of the terms of trade between grain and some textile fabrics between 1614 and 1616. The results support the hypothesis of a higher consumption of textile products in Andalusia than in Old Castile at the beginning of the 17th century.

Over the past two decades it has been questioned whether the electric utility industry is a natural monopoly. Electricity generation is no longer considered a natural monopoly and the topic is debated in relation to electricity distribution. This article explores the main contributions in this field in order to apply their findings to the Spanish Electric Utility Industry in the inter-war period. The study focuses on one of the major Spanish companies, Sociedad Hidroeléctrica Española, and shows that generation, transmission and distribution of electricity were. natural monopolies. The results indicate that the monopolistic structure which the inter-war electric utility industry exhibited was the optimal form of organisation.

This essay examines the opportunity of erecting a national electricity network before 1936. Regional markets were created by coordinating electricity networks in France, Switzerland and Great Britain during the twenties. In Spain, a review of technical journals indicates that this issue had become significant in the nationalistic economic policy environment of the inter-war period. The Spanish Government made several attempts at setting up a national electricity grid through public tenders. However, none of the projects succeeded and the development of an electricity-grid was left to private firms' initiative and the network did not achieve a national coverage until the 1980s. Seen from the standpoint of the 1930s, the high investment costs the interconnection required rendered this project unfeasible. As a matter of fact, a national-grid may not have represented an alternative to dam-building in order to improve the efficiency of the Spanish electrical system.

This article makes a plea for a joint study of intellectual and economic history. Mental perceptions affect economic decisions and variables, while economic realities influence the evolution of ideas. We use the case of Castilian noblemen and their management of landed property to illustrate these interrelations. This was driven to a large extent by the «moral economy» of the group, which provided a moral justification of its privileged place in society. However, during the early modern age new ideas and economic difficulties eroded these concepts and attitudes, and led to an increasing interest of nobility towards an efficient management of their properties. The delicate equilibrium between gains and prestige –intended as an indirect means to acquire wealth– as well as the intermingling of religious worries make it difficult to get a balanced view of the real situation and its evolution, which is none the less necessary.

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.

In early modern Castile the Crown authority was played within the political arena having as a mirror the so-called economica (the art of the good government of the household). The king, a prudent father of his subjects, should punish and sometimes pardon the criminals in order to keep the political body balanced. The criminal punishment or pardon should be the end of every lawsuit. Seville in the times of Cervantes offered lots of occasions to develop judicial practices. This article explains how justice was developed within this framework and gives a picture of Ancient Régime justice quite different to the repressive justice depicted by Foucault in his Surveiller et punir.

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.

This work explores the management of public forests in Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century, in an effort to evaluate its effectiveness. For this purpose the article examine why and how the State made public forest management concessions to private enterprise, and analyzes the specific clauses of the contracts. The main conclusion is that those clauses were inefficient and although they accelerated forest product extractions, they did not achieve a constant growth of forest productivity. This could have had a negative effect on the sustainability of the forests being managed.

In this article, we present an analysis of the institutional evolution of firing in Spain. We explain how a certain path-dependence has been created by historical accidents and how this is the mechanism behind the current system of a costly employment at will. The incentives of firms, workers and governments to sustain such a system are also discussed. We show the main inefficiencies of the system: a substantial increase in severance pay, a distorted use of the legal framework, and limitations to give a rapid answer to a big negative shock. Finally, we discuss how the unemployment benefits reform of 2002 can be understood as the culmination of Spain's policy of costly employment at will.

The fiscal reform of 1683 originated a documentation of great demographic value that has not yet been published. This paper presents and evaluates the new source in order to know the evolution of Castilian population in a period without credible data until now. The Vecindario of 1683 is verified twice in the study, firstly by the birth rate and secondly by comparing the population growth with that of baptisms. The result demonstrated that the decline of 1591'1631 had not yet been recovered in 1683 and that the subsequent growth was faster in 1683'1752 than in 1752'1787.

In this paper we apply three different statistical procedures to the peseta/dollar exchange rate with the aim of discovering the true foreign exchange regime followed by the monetary authorities during the 1965–1998 period. The study's perspective emphasizes the divergence between de jure and defacto exchange regimes. The results seem to imply that the peseta, as well as other currencies, did not exhibit the floating regime that de jure had in relation to the US dollar in the last three decades of its existence. On the contrary, the peseta/dollar exchange rate moved within rather narrow fluctuation bands during those years.

The life and work of Miguel de Cervantes coincide with the first cycle of globalization. One of the main engines of the world economy was the silver trade between the Americas and the Asian markets. The new world economy was developing at the same time as the «military revolution» in Eurasia. The Spanish, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and Russian empires and other political entities used the new military «hardware» and «software» to expand their borders and to maintain their position employing the larger part of their financial resources. These new economic and political realities propelled ecological exchanges that would irrevocably change the history of the world. That was the time of Don Quixote.

This paper illustrates the spread of Jean-Baptiste Say's entrepreneur theory in Spain –a last contribution within the French tradition in which Richard Cantillon and A. R. J. Turgot were predecessors. We attempt to demonstrate that this is a special case, because, even though J. B. Say was the most important author from a publishing point of view, his economic theory of entrepreneurship had very little influence. The spread of economic ideas by way of translation and Spanish authors which employed J. B. Say's economic theory, give possible explanations to a paradox which had left economic policy without a theoretical reference. We analyse how Say's entrepreneur theory was received among Spanish authors in the 19th century, its degree of comprehension and the analytical additions made, and attempt to identify the real source of transmission.

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.

In the last decades of the sixteenth and the beginning of seventeenth century -that is, at the time Don Quixote was written and published-, an important change began in Spanish-muslim commercial relations. Removal of products, based on raids and plunders, thanks to north-African kings vassalage and subjection of tribes living on the coast, turned into mercantile interchanges completely normalized with those countries, impossible to be dominate. The importance and vitality of this trade is testified by the arrival of ships from Muslim countries, wheat imports from these and, last of all, American silver shipped to the quoted destinations.

This article explores the behavior of exchange rates in Spain during the 18th century. We analyze the exchange rates quoted in London on three Spanish cities between 1699 and 1826. After a brief review of how the Spanish monetary system worked and how exchange rates were determined, we assess to which extent the exchange rate responded to market fundamentals by testing two theoretical models of exchange rate determination. The results suggest that purchasing power parity held during the 18th century, with the exchange rate tracking quite closely the behavior of inflation differentials. Deviations from PPP appeared at the end of the century, due mostly to changes in the real exchange rate caused by the bilateral trade between Spain and Great Britain and, maybe, due to productivity differentials.

This article examines a case study of profound agricultural transformations along the Early Modern Age. Around the protoindustrial town of Alcoi there was an intense process of substitution of cultivations that altered the physiognomy of the rural activities of an area traditionally considered as poor from the agrarian point of view. The catalogue of these changes is substantial: the substitution of wheat for barley, the early introduction of corn and its strong spread, the advance of the cultivation of vine, and, finally, the adoption of crop rotations in the irrigable area that was part of a limited extension of land, though significant for a mountainous area. Throughout the text these changes are described and explained, keeping in mind the proto-industrial framework in which they appear, as well as their context in the Valencián and Spanish environment.