Taking as an example the island of Mallorca, the authors identify the different socioenvironmental, institutional and economic factors that influenced the feudal colonization of this island in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This study also suggests, by comparing this case with others, that the petrification of the late medieval agrarian structures introduced a sort of path dependence which favoured certain patterns of development to the detriment of others.

The «rentas provinciales» were a group of indirect taxes that provided an important part of the Spanish fiscal revenues. This taxes were criticized specially for being a constraint upon economic development. Several studies abaut «rentas provinciales» have used net revenues, in most cases not distributed among the twenty-two Castile provinces. This article shows gross revenues, administrative costs and net revenues obtained from «relaciones generales de valores» made by «administradores generales de las provincias», available at Archivo General de Simancas. Using this data, it is possible to obtain new conclusions about the quantitative evolution of this taxes and about its influence in the economic growth of the Castile Crown in XVIIIth-century.

One of the consequences of transformations in Spanish land properties in the 19th century was the constitution of an extensive (6.6 million hectares) public forest patrimony —still kept— dependent on the Central Administration. In this article, an overview of the main features, as well as the management and production forms of such a patrimony, is presented. State intervention is divided into four stages and, considering their results rather than their initial goals, two main conclusions are reached. First, given their characteristics, public forests were not adequate for the government to be able to lead this part of the forest national economy. Second, the central administration applied not one but several public forest policies, according to changes in the markets and to the economic situation, and social and ecological conditions where forests were found.

Employing DEA productivity analysis and the Malmquist index, this article investigates the productivity differences and its sources across a set of banks during the last years of the liberal era of the Spanish banking system (1900–1914), which was characterised by major qualitative and quantitative changes in the banking industry. We find evidence of an overall increase in efficiency consequence of increasing competition across banks. Also, our estimates suggest that differences in productivity could serve to explain, at least in part, the subsequent evolution of the different regional banking groups.

This article shows the first results of a research project that attempts to analyse the relations between the business groups, the institutional framework and the economic development in 20th century Spain. It employs a microeconomic perspective, a historical-institutional analysis and private archival sources. The article focuses on the businesses of the Aznar family from 1937 (when they took over the management of the firms that formerly belonged to the Sota and Aznar group) to 1983 (when Naviera Aznar, the most important firm of the group, broke out and ceased business). Out of this empirical evidence, the article tries to underline the consequences that an industrial organization based on business groups and on an institutional framework characterized by the State's extreme interventionism and discretionality had on the capabilities and the competitiveness of Spanish firms and industries, and, by extension, on the economic development of Spain during the Franco's regime and the first Governments of the transition to democracy.

La primera biografía de Keynes la publicó Harrod (1951), cinco años después de su muerte; el autor de la segunda fue Moggridge (1976), gran conocedor de la obra de Keynes y responsable de la mayor parte de los Collected Writings (CW), obra que completaría en 1992 con la magnífica Maynard Keynes. An economist' biography. Otros libros biográficos con planteamientos menos generales son los de Hession (1984), Mini (1994) y Felix (1999). Los artículos biográficos son muy numerosos; los más importantes están recogidos en el volumen I de los Critical Assessments, editados por Cunnigham Wood (1983), y en la primera parte del libro de M. Keynes (1975).