This paper discusses and documents a new data set of real wages for unskilled, semi-skilled and relatively skilled labour in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela (LA-6) over the period 1900-2011. Three interrelated aspects are examined: the wage growth record associated with periods dominated by a particular development strategy; developments in the wage share of income; and movements in skill premiums and their links with fundamentals. The key findings are: (i) the region’s unskilled wage rose by 147 per cent compared to rises of 254 per cent in the average wage and 440 per cent in income per worker (including both property and labour income); (ii) the average LA-6 wage share started a secular fall in the 1950s; (iii) skill premiums tended to peak during the middle decades of the 20th century, coinciding with the acceleration of industrialisation and the timing of the demographic transition. Movements in the terms of trade are broadly associated with both fluctuations and trends in wage premiums, though the direction of the link is country and time specific.

Over the past century and a half, Spain has had a tumultuous political history. What impact has this had on social policy? Democracy has had a positive effect on both the levels of social spending and its long-term growth trend. With the arrival of democracy in 1931, the transition began from a traditional regime (with low levels of social spending) to a modern regime (with high levels of social spending). Franco’s dictatorship, however, reversed this change in direction, retarding the positive growth in social spending. At the same time, the effect of left-wing parties was statistically significant only in the 1930s (prior to the Keynesian consensus) and in the period of the Bourbon Restoration (when the preferences of low-income groups were systematically ignored).

This paper focusses on the financial relations between the banking sector and the Treasury in Modern Spain. Tax systems have been insufficient, generating a chronic budget deficit. This drove to irresponsible public debt management, being the State a serial defaulter until 1987. This prevented the budget deficits could be financed by sovereign debt issued on the stock exchanges, and forced the state to resort to banks (public and private). The new series of public debt banks portfolios evolution is explained by their pursuit of returns and by changes in banking regulation and financial repression, which favoured the banking status quo. The paper analyses the causes of banking regulation, derived from the public borrowing policy and also from the banking lobbying strategy. It examines the consequences of the deadly banking-state embrace which brought about the interconnection between fiscal and banking crises.

Most of the Catalan vineyards were cultivated by means of sharecropping contracts that granted the sharecropper ownership rights over the land. This paper maintains that the “bundle of rights” view of property is not the most appropriate for analysing situations of this kind. It shows that, from around 1900 onwards, sharecroppers’ rights became insecure, which gave rise to a series of dysfunctions that resulted in the contract no longer being optimal. It concludes that the removal of the inefficiencies arising from shared ownership was a sufficient reason to justify the agrarian reform that the Catalan Parliament sought to introduce in 1934.

The literature on internationalisation processes in family businesses has boomed with the emergence of new approaches and different perspectives. One of these schemes analyses the so-called born-again global firms, mostly technology companies, which experienced an internationalisation process after one or more serious incidents affecting it. The case of Ines Rosales extends the frontier of the meaning of a global born-again firm to firms in industries and traditional products. One of its most striking aspects is that the flagship product is centennial and based on basic ingredients. In addition, the production process of the firm mix production by hand and mechanised developments. Inés Rosales shows the ability of a family Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) in a process of internationalisation even in culturally distant markets through the traditional cake of olive oil.