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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Agradezco a la Revista de Historia Económica que me permita publicar esta réplica. Stefan Houpt me contesta con dos argumentos: a) los costes del arrabio vizcaíno dados por los ingenieros del Crédit Lyonnais son erróneos; b) los costes del lingote de Altos Homos de Vizcaya eran menores que los del también no fosforoso de dos fábricas británicas de la Dowlais Iron Company, lo que prueba la competitividad intemacional de la siderurgia vasca. Como no puedo extender-me por encima del folio, me limito a replicar de modo «telegráfico»: