Small landownership had an outstanding role in determining the process of viticultural specialization that some well-defined territories known as “comarcas” experienced in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Catalonia. The net product these small landholdings yielded was not enough to safeguard the reproduction of the peasant family units closely linked to those small areas devoted to vineyards. It is for this reason that this article analyzes the different strategies these families developed in order to guarantee their reproduction, either as consumption or production units.

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.

The quantification of the American remittances is tended to distinguish among wealth public and private. Fruit of this are some wrong results, above all in the XVII century. The present article study the precious metals import for the Royal Estate. It is intended to show that the remittances with which counted the Wreath were more important than what traditionally it has been considered. The cause of its infravaloration resides in a wrong analysis of the source of used official character. To know which was the volume of precious metals with which counted the Royal Estate is a resolutive topic to understand the evolution of the credit of the Wreath and the relationships that maintained with the foreign bankers.

Después de una larga serie de esfuerzos acumulativos, los historiadores del Pensamiento Económico se han puesto sustancialmente de acuerdo sobre cuáles han sido los principales aportes de la escolástica española a la ciencia económica. Radican éstos en el desarrollo de la teoría del valor y del precio, la integración de la teoría monetaria en la teoría general de los precios, la teoría cuantitativa del dinero, una interesante teoría de los cambios, la doctrina general del interés y el análisis del sistema tributario. Se trata de ideas que surgieron en la consideración de las grandes cuestiones fundamentales del justo precio, de la usura y de los tributos.

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.

Resulta, sin duda, excesivamente atrevido el tratar de esbozar la coyuntura de la minería y la metalurgia europeas durante más de cinco siglos. La variabilidad de la producción y las vacilaciones de la demanda, impuestas por razones í, tecnológicas y económicas, hacen la empresa muy difícil. Un recurso, casi imprescindible, es el de soslayar la producción de aquellos metales menos significativos, a la vez que intentar ofrecer una perspectiva general que recoja los grandes trazos de la coyuntura.

This paper studies the figure of «Factor General del rey» in the organization and work of the Royal Finances of Castilla between 1627 and 1644, under the reformist government of the Count-Duke of Olivares. During these years, the Factor General was Bartolomé Spinola, one of the most importante Genoese bankers of Phillip IV. This article analyses the strategy of Royal Finances in the financial market during the early seventeenth century, and the role played by the most important bankers. To begin with, I examine why the Royal Finances needed a Factor General. At this moment, the Crown was establishing a system where the policy was established by experts. The presence of financiers in the court of Madrid grew as much as to influence economic policy. Later afterwards, I explain who Bartolomé Spinola was and how he got to become the main important banker, and then the Factor General. Drawing upon the experience and understanding he gained from his activities in the financial markets as a private banker, he could influence the direction of the political economy of the Spanish Empire. Finally, I analyse briefly some of the functions of the Factor General in the financing of the Crown's expenses, and his intervention in the problems relative to the vellon coinage.

Latin America had the highest tariffs in the world before 1914; Asia had the lowest. Heavily protected Latin America also boasted some of the most explosive belle époque growth, while open Asia registered some of the least. What brought the two regions to the opposite ends of the tariff policy spectrum? We find that limits to Asian tariff policy autonomy may have lowered tariffs substantially there, but by themselves they cannot explain why Asian tariffs were so much lower than the Latin American tariffs before 1914; that natural barriers, domestic political economy and strategic tariff policy seems to have contributed much to the difference and that the origins of Asian post-World War 2 import-substitution policies seem to lie in the interwar years when Asian tariff levels caught up with those of Latin America.

To date, research on the economic history of Brazil during the 19th century has relied on official foreign trade statistics, the accuracy of which has repeatedly been put into question. This paper provides insights into the accuracy of the official series by examining the accuracy of the export and import series for Brazil during the 19th century. We re-estimate the official import series using trading partner sources, and find that the official series was marginally under-valued during certain periods of the 19th century. Furthermore, we provide new upper- and lower-bound estimates of the export series by testing different assumptions regarding the size of the cost, insurance and freight to free on board factor adjustments. Finally, we introduce a new import price index for the period 1827-1913.

Argentina's long term economic performance between 1880 and 2000 (convergence with the rich followed by divergence) can be understood in terms of the economic and political consequences of its peculiar factor endowments. Skewed endowments meant huge gains from trade during the First Globalization boom; but, conversely, disintegration of world commerce in the Depression was a heavier blow for such a naturally specialized economy. The extreme protectionism, characteristic of the post-war period, was related to the country's peculiar economic structure: comparative advantages in food production and disadvantages in (labor-intensive) manufacturing implied that closing the economy was a political winner, though it eventually hampered growth. The road to openness followed in the last quarter of the 20th century would have meant, correspondingly, an increase in inequality. Attempts to moderate it through debt accumulation and exchange rate appreciation destabilized the economy and contributed further to Argentina's comparative decline.

I Los reinados de los dos primeros Austrias españoles se encuentran cuajados de intentos y esfuerzos por dotar de más eficacia y control a la gestión financiera de la Corona, superando los inconvenientes de la gran dispersión y desparramamiento del aparato hacendístico, no menos grave, a estos efectos, que la corruptión propia de la época y que la falta de un funcionariado organizado y eficiente.

Aunque algunos de estos intentos alcanzaron resultados más o menos positivos, no puede uno evitar, sin embargo, una leve sensación de punzante patetismo al asomarse a todo este contexto, a este incesante y angustioso ir y venir de los monarcas en pos de unos frutos que sólo cosechaban en medida parca y desproporcionada. Pero su urgencia era grande, y la necesidad de más y más fondos para financiar su política de liderazgo europeo les forzaba a la instrumentación de nuevos arbitrios y a una mejor canalización y administratión de los fondos recaudados.

Using social tables and modern household surveys, this article explores Brazil's income distribution from a historical perspective (1850-2010), examining its relationship with economic development and the factors driving inequality changes. It shows that Brazil's inequality was not always high, but rather followed a Kuznets curve, increasing from the early 20th century, reaching a high plateau between the 1970s and 1990s and declining thereafter. Notably, results highlight the importance of both economic and political factors for enabling the completion of the second Kuznets curve phase.

The essay examines Spain’s colonial legacy in the long-run development of Spanish America. It surveys the fiscal and constitutional outcomes of independence and assesses the relative burden imposed by colonialism. Constitutional asymmetries between revenue collecting and spending agents constrained de facto governments’ power to tax. Inherent disparities embedded in the colonial fiscal system worsened with vaguely defined representation for subjects and territories and vexed their aggregation into a modern representative polity. Governments with limited fiscal capacity failed to deliver public goods and to distribute the costs and benefits of independence equitably. Growing indirect taxes, debt and money creation allowed them to transfer the fiscal burden to other constituents or future generations. Taxpayers became aware of the asymmetry between private contributions and public goods and hence favoured a low but regressive taxation. Comparisons with trajectories in the metropolis and the United States are offered to qualify this legacy.

La industria del cemento artificial portland constituye un caso típico de oligopolio en todos los países en los que está implantada. Se trata, quizá, del ejemplo más socorrido que encuentran los autores de tratados de economía. Por su propia naturaleza —canteras, inversión de capital fijo, costes variables modestos—, este sector está compuesto por un corto número de fabricantes.

This work aims to evaluate the extent of State intervention in the process of the redefinition of property rights. By studying the evolution of municipal woodlands in Extremadura, my main objective is to analyse the two mechanisms of intervention in the area of publicly held property: the definitive privatisation of property and the technical inspection of production. Even if we play down the effect of legislation, the present investigation confirms the full success of the privatisation formula employed in the Sapnish Southwest. State control over production, however, was far less efficient. Precisely in this area we can see how difficult it is for the State to enforce a comprehensively policy throghout its territory.

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.

This article estimates the social savings of the railroads in Peru in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The construction of railroads made it possible for Peruvians to substitute the traditional system of mules and llamas, although only for a few routes. Using primary and secondary sources, I estimate the social savings for 1890, 1904, 1914 and 1918. Social savings ranged between 0.3 per cent and 1.3 per cent of GDP in 1890, but then increased to a range between 3.6 per cent and 9.4 per cent of GDP in 1918. The social savings of railroads in Peru were comparable to those for the United States and Great Britain but were much lower than those for Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, largely because Peru had very few railroads.

Regional economic differences in Colombia have persisted over time. The present study seeks to contribute to the debate on the territorial differences of the country through the identification of patterns of low coverage in both primary and secondary education between 1904 and 1958. The results, coinciding with other studies on income, show a tendency towards the formation of an educational cluster in the centre of the country and the existence of a human capital trap in the periphery. The results also suggest that there is a high correlation between fiscal capacity and enrolment rates. Finally, it can also be observed that territories with the highest enrolment rates are associated with high urban enrolment rates during the process of country-wide urbanisation.

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.

Rice was one of the crops that improved agricultural yields under the restrictive conditions of the mediterranean world. However the expansion of its cultivation demanded deep changes in the use of water and new forms of government intervention because of the sanitary effects of the crop. The introduction of rice in the existent agrarian structures was not easy. However it facilitated the use of difficult agrarian areas such as the Valencián Albufera, the delta of the Ebro and the Marismas of the Guadalquivir. From the second half of the XIX century rice production had to adapt to the competition of the Asian countries. This was done through the intensification of the production under high and protective tariffs. The paper shows that the Spanish yields were among the highest in the world in the XX century.