El trabajo analiza la innovación en la industria militar en España entre 1878 y 1939 a partir de las patentes y los contratos de defensa. El alto porcentaje de contratos de productos patentados (63%) es indicio de una notable relación entre patentes y contratos. Esto se ve confirmado por la coincidencia en el orden de los principales países en ambas variables. El test econométrico confirma la estadística descriptiva y, además, evidencia que las patentes a priori más valiosas (de invención, puestas en práctica, más longevas y empresariales) tienen una correlación más fuerte con los contratos. Desde la óptica sectorial también se observa una correlación positiva y significativa, aunque menos intensa que desde el espacial. El análisis micro confirma la estrecha relación de las patentes con la actividad del sector de armamento militar, explicita los protagonistas y las vías de esa relación (importación, producción local y licencias) y explica las disparidades observadas en el análisis agregado.

In September 1939, Portugal made a realist strategic choice to preserve the Portuguese Empire maintaining by its neutrality and also remaining an ally of Great Britain. While the Portuguese could rely largely on their colonies for raw materials to sustain the mainland, the country had long depended on British transportation for these goods and the Portuguese military. With the British priority now given to war transportation, Portugal's economy and Empire were particularly vulnerable. The Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar sought to mitigate this damage by maintaining particularly friendly financial relations with the British government, including increased exports of Portuguese merchandise and services and permission to accumulate credits in Sterling to cover deficits in the balance of payments. This paper gives an improved set of comprehensive statistics for the Anglo-Portuguese and German–Portuguese relationships, reported in Pounds and according to international standards. The reported statistics include the trade in merchandise, services, capital flows, loans and third-party transfers of funds in favour of the British account. When compared with the German statistics, the Anglo-Portuguese figures show the Portuguese government favoured the British in financial relations, an active choice by Salazar to maintain the Portuguese Empire.

Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of the size and functioning of the non-bank segments within the credit market has been a great challenge for historians. Notarial deeds are widely available, but typically shed light on the borrowing of relatively well-to-do members of society. Probate inventories and insolvency records do provide insight into the modest loans of ordinary people, but only haphazardly and not for the overall stock of loans. This article exploits an exogenous shock, the Discipline Act introduced in the Netherlands in 1856, which forced lenders to record all unredeemed loans they had provided to a particular group of borrowers: seafarers. The c.14,000 loans that were recorded, in combination with several additional sources, provide a unique insight into the overall size, composition and functioning of a particular segment of the non-bank credit market.

This paper proposes a methodology for quantifying the territorial impact on population distribution of the railway. The central hypothesis is that access to railway services provides the best-connected areas with a long-term comparative advantage over others that are less accessible. Carrying out a historical analysis and providing comparable data at the municipal level allows us to determine the extent to which the railway has fostered the concentration of population within its immediate surroundings. The case study presented here is that of Spain between 1900 and 2001, but the same methodology could equally be applied to any other country for which the required data are available. In this case, key data included a Geographic Information System with information about both the development of the railway network and census data relating to total population at the municipal level. The results obtained suggest the relevance of this methodology, which makes it possible to identify the periods and areas in which this influence was most significant.

This article analyses the origin of the persistently high level of electricity prices that hampered the expansion of electricity consumption during the interwar period in Porto. Initially, the rent-seeking behaviour of both the supply firm and the City Hall at the local level affected the expansion of the local electricity market. During the 1930s, this collusion at municipal level coincided with unpredictable energy policies at state level. This circumstance impeded the indispensable increase of scale and the building of a regional market of electricity in north Portugal. The literature on regulation and institutional analysis has proved very useful. Finally, though equally important, primary sources from company archives and institutional bodies were also employed.

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 paper explains the so-called «Spanish railways problem» as a consequence of the new competition that this traditional mean of transport suffered from the rapid development of the automobile industry. Road transportation more than any other factor was the cause of the financial difficulties of the railways companies before the Civil War. We also study the reaction of these firms and the failures of all measures that were taken.