This article analyzes the impact of Augusto Pinochet’s autocracy on the Chilean economy. The study compares outcomes under Pinochet’s leadership with those in a synthetic counterfactual made of a weighted average of countries with similar characteristics. It finds that, relative to the control, Chilean income per capita greatly underperformed for at least the first fifteen years after Pinochet’s coup. The results are robust to extending the pool of donor countries and expanding the pretreatment period by switching data sets to capture potential heterogeneity of effects. The evidence suggests that Chile’s remarkable economic growth during the period 1985–1997 did not depend on Pinochet’s autocracy. These results further bring into question the effectiveness of the regime to enhance economic growth and the narrative of the Chilean miracle.

Devaluations were traditionally considered to be expansionary in the short run and have no real long-run effects. Alternatively, some observers in developing countries found that devaluations were contractionary on impact, and that they might foster long-term growth. Using Argentina as a case study, which is convenient due to its long series availability and its subsequent switches in exchange rate regimes, four structural shocks are identified in line with the traditional and alternative views. It is found that devaluations were mostly contractionary, and that real long-run effects were only possible when inflation was either low or moderate. In light of the estimates, a historical revision of Argentinean devaluation episodes from 1854 to 2018 has been carried out.

This article presents estimates of the financial costs incurred by Portugal with the Colonial War (1961-1974). The results obtained show that, on average, the extraordinary expenses most directly related with the war represented 22% of Portuguese state expenditure, equivalent to 3.1% of GDP. They also show that the total costs incurred by Portugal with the Colonial War amounted to between 21.8 billion euros and 29.8 billion euros, at today's prices and in the present-day currency. By estimating a dynamic model, it was also possible to identify a positive relationship between the extraordinary military expenditure on the defence and security of the overseas provinces—which included the budgetary costs of war—and Portuguese economic growth. The conclusions reached represent a valuable contribution to contemporary economic history.

In this paper we explore the relationship between the presence of agglomeration economies and regional economic growth in Spain during the period 1870-1930. The study allows us to revisit the existence of a trade-off between economic growth and territorial cohesion, and also to examine whether the existence of agglomeration economies could explain the upswing in regional income inequality during the early stages of development. In doing so, we present alternative indicators for agglomeration economies and estimate conditional growth regressions at province (NUTS3) level. In line with new economic geography models, agglomeration economies in a context of market integration widened regional inequality in the second half of the 19th century and hindered its reduction during the early decades of the 20th.

Based on a variety of archival sources, this paper presents estimations for cost of living and living standards for Lima, Peru during the 19th century. During this century Peru experienced deep swings in economic activity marked by the independence wars, the War of the Pacific, and a commodity boom. These new series show that a sizable inflationary period during the guano age had dampening effects on the living standards of the popular class. While living standards peaked by mid 1850s, GDP per capita did not do so until two decades later. These results suggest that the guano bonanza failed to lift working-class living standards above subsistence levels. Even though living standards climbed steadily, almost reaching those of England, all these gains were lost by the end of the century.

This paper measures the direct contribution of railways to economic growth before 1914 in four Latin American economies with large railway systems (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay) using growth accounting techniques. The outcomes of the analysis indicate that the growth contribution of railways in Uruguay was very low. By contrast, in Argentina and Mexico railways provided huge benefits, amounting to 20-25% of income per capita growth before 1914. Finally, in Brazil, the growth contribution of railways was even higher, although this was largely a consequence of the stagnation of the Brazilian economy. These results provide an example of a technology whose growth contribution was much higher in some peripheral economies than in the core countries where it was developed.

This paper reviews the analysis of technological change by cliometricians. It focuses on lessons about total factor productivity (TFP) from growth accounting and on aspects of social capability that are conducive to the effective assimilation of new technology. Key messages are that when TFP growth is very rapid this typically involves reductions in inefficiency not just technological advance and that even really important new technologies have small initial effects on aggregate productivity. Incentive structures matter greatly for the adoption of new technology, but social capability is not independent of the technological epoch as the information and communications technology (ICT) era has emphasized to Europeans.

This paper presents a first estimate of income inequality in the Southern Cone of South America (Brazil 1872 and 1920, Chile 1870 and 1920, Uruguay 1920) and some assumptions with regard to Argentina (1870 and 1920) and Uruguay (1870). We find that income distribution was relatively high on the eve of the first globalization boom. Thus, inequality is not only the result of globalization, but also a structural feature. Inequality increased between 1870 and 1920, both within individual countries and between countries. Globalization forces do not result in obvious outcomes. Rather, the effect of globalization on inequality depends on the expansion of the frontier and institutional persistence and change in old and new areas. Inequality was clearly high in the wake of the globalization process. This was a particular kind of inequality, which was part of a set of institutions closely linked to the exports of primary goods, sluggish technological change and limited human capital formation.

This paper attempts to investigate the main factors behind Argentina's relative economic decline by comparing its evolution with that of Australia and Canada. For this purpose a ‘reduced index of economic freedom’ has been constructed in order to capture and summarise the principal macroeconomic trends in Argentina compared with the other regions of recent settlement during the period between 1875 and 2000. The results, obtained using cointegration and causality techniques, show how the macroeconomic policies that were implemented are able to explain the relative evolution of Argentina's economy, in terms of GDP per capita, over the long term. The results revise some of the interpretations prevalent in Argentine historiography.

In this paper the economic performance of post-independence Latin America is assessed in comparative perspective. The release from the colonial fiscal burden was partly offset by higher costs of self-government, while the opening of independent Latin American countries to the international economy represented a handmaiden of growth. Regional disparities increased after independence, so generalisations about the region's long-run behaviour are not straightforward. However, on average, per capita income grew in Latin America, and although the region fell behind compared with the United States and Western Europe, it improved or maintained its position relative to the rest of the world. Thus the term ‘lost decades’ appears an unwarranted depiction of the period between 1820 and 1870.

In this essay I analyze the impact of the many constitutions Colombia drafted during the nineteenth century on its economic development. Some prototypical constitutions are chosen as they became building blocks of the legal structure of the country. I try to show that constitutional and legal instability played a more important role in the lack of development than the Spanish legacy. While commercial, political and religious monopolies were inherited and constituted the ideological base of the conservatives, many of them were dismantled by the liberal reforms. The loss of the political order which the Spanish had maintained for three centuries was followed by the painful search for a new political code, for which the Creole elites were responsible. The excesses of concentration or diffusion of power produced the pendulum movements between centralism and federalism which were essential causes of the political disorder during the nineteenth century, which held back the country's economic performance.

This paper analyse the evolution of income and wealth distribution in the settler economies in order to evaluate the manner in which the historical conditions generated certain productive structure and trade pattern and, therefore, the economic dynamic in the long run.

We consider two channels to interpret the relations between the distributive pattern and the productive and trade structure: the aggregate demand and the institutional and geographic factors. The analysis focus on four proximate causes of the specialization, i.e., learning capacity, innovation and technical progress, accumulation of fixed capital and formation of human capital. We use a comparative approach to look for the main differences in the development of settler economies during the period 1870–1940.

Firstly, we present the historical context and, then, some econometric exercises are tested to give more insights to this view. The evidence shows that economies with high inequality present an economic structure characterized by production with small incorporation of knowledge and low added-value. As a result, in the long run they verify worse performances than other economies with a more equitable distributive pattern.

Using the Penn World Table, the CEPAL statistics and the OxLAD data base for the period 1950–2000, and considering a sample of 18 Latin American countries, this paper tries to test for convergence within the region. The results from a panel data approach only allow us to speak about convergence in a conditional sense. In fact, one of the main factors behind both economic growth and the catching up process in the region is the level of human capital. This variable has been constructed using Principal Components methodology and taking into consideration primary and secondary school enrolment ratios, the number of inhabitants per doctor, life expectancy, the infant mortality rate and the dependency rate.

The importance of political institutions in the economic performance of developing countries is generally overlooked. Argentine economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries relied on the production of rural exports. The production structure in agriculture was supported by the widespread use of tenancy contracts. This paper uses spatial analysis and logistic regression to study the role of Congress in shaping tenancy legislation for the period 1912 to 1943. The finding is that legislative reform was a product of how political institutions worked in Congress providing veto power to Conservatives over the proposals of Radicals. Electoral fraud in the 1930s stopped tenancy legislation and gave rise to revolutionary changes in the 1940s.

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.

This essay contends that Western Europe's economy started to grow at a more rapid pace than the rest of the World during the Early Modern or Late Medieval era. Using the latest quantitative information available it is argued that, between the years 1000 and 1820, GDP per head in Western Europe experienced a threefold increase whereas that of the rest of the World grew only 33 per cent. Among the factors responsible for this difference the author highlights the progress in navigation techniques, with its consequences on trade and the division of labour; the adoption of institutions that also favoured trade; the knowledge revolution which started during the Renaissance period; the political division of Europe, with its corollary of competition among states and enhanced freedom, as well as the development of individualism favoured by the Christian cultural tradition.

Historical studies show that the average height of Western European children began its secular growth in 1850 only after a period of decline and stagnation which had started around 1750. We argue that the initial downturn in heights is related to the demographic transition, and show that an extension of the neoclassical model of economic growth can explain the observed phenomena. We test whether the predictions of the model hold for a cross-section of contemporary countries, and we find that stature is indeed negatively associated with income per capita and fertility for countries with an income per capita below a given threshold. As a final exercise, we ask whether these cross-country estimates explain the improvement in children's height observed in the last hundred and fifty years.