El decenio tal vez peor conocido de la economía española del.siglo xx es el de 1940. Las dificultades para utilizar determinadas fuentes, en unos casos, y los muchos defectos e insuficiencias de las disponibles, en otros, han desalentado la investigación de unos años cuya sombría memoria —esa «basura acumulada de tiempos viejos», por decirlo al modo de Faulkner— quizá haya contribuido también, todo debe decirse, a desincentivar la dedicación de historiadores y estudiosos. Por eso deben acogerse con especial interés los trabajos que de unau otra forma, incluso con referencias sólo tangenciales, abordan el análisis de dicho período.

This article seeks to analyze the cocoa circuits during the final years of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the transition towards independence and the beginning of the world cocoa crisis in 1820. Added to the traditional circuits of Guayaquil and Maracaibo linked with Pamplona, the article identifies circuits that were speculated to exist in the southwest of New Granada, but because they did not move large volumes, they were not considered for production statistics. These small productions supplied the domestic market, also exported or integrated into circuits from other places that had better interactions in international markets. It is not a microhistory of cocoa in remote regions, it is the history of a cocoa overshadowed by the visibility of others.

The recent European debt crisis has renewed interest as to why debtor countries honour their foreign debts and subscribe to respectively burdensome rescheduling conditions. While the cost of defaulting in a domestic financial system has been recognised as a main motive for repayment, the factors that cause sovereign states to refrain from debt repudiation are not fully understood. This article investigates the reasons behind the repayment decision and weak negotiating position of the Mexican government following the 1982 debt crisis. It shows that leading commercial banks had considerable amounts of external loans in their books, and that Mexican policymakers lacked the foreign exchange access they needed to secure the stability of the domestic banking system. The high exposure of domestic banks to Mexican debt and their heightened dependence on foreign capital worked as mechanisms that allowed international creditors to enforce their claims and deterred Mexico from declaring a unilateral default.

This paper examines the cost of living and evolution of welfare ratios among urban workers in Rio Grande's vila, the main commercial enclave of the southern Portuguese dominions in America. From diverse sources (military and hospital expenditure accounts, merchant credit bills from probate inventories), we build different consumption baskets to calculate their cost in seven benchmark years: 1772, 1792, 1802, 1809, 1816, 1819 and 1823. The evolution of cost of living shows a consistent upward trend during the period, which, however, does not substantially affect welfare ratios. In order to build regional comparisons, we follow Allen's methodology (2001) to estimate welfare ratios of skilled and unskilled workers in Rio Grande, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The results of using this approach could be useful to adjust the methodology for further international comparisons.

The economic history of the Spanish Second Republic has received a big impulse in the last years, but new research is still required. In the present work we approach the behaviour of the Spanish banking system between 1930 and 1935 on the basis of the new theories on credit rationing. The conclusions support a supply side interpretation of the fall in the avalaible amount of credit.

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.

This article discusses the evolution of the total and social public expenditure in Uruguay during the 20th century. It analyzes the growth path of the social public expenditure and the extent up to which it could be preserved from the cyclical economic downturns and the fiscal constraints of the Public Sector. The paper finds a low long-run elasticity of public spending to GDP – leading to a slow growth of social public expenditure and a remarkable procyclical pattern of total and social public expenditure. It also shows that social spending, especially education expenditure, has often been used as an instrument to curb budget deficits. No distinctive «fiscal regimes» for the period could be identified.

This paper examines the non-reversal of fortune thesis proposed by Acemoglu et al. (2002) in the light of the Colombian experience over the last 500 years. Using a total of fourteen national population censuses and the record of tributary Indians in 1559, it is found that the population density of Colombian regions presented a high degree of persistence through time. Thus, the evidence indicates that those places that were prosperous circa 1500 remain so today, and vice versa. These results indicate that the long-run influences of geography on regional economic disparities within a country are not negligible.

This article analyzes the effects generated by the import and consumption of madeja silk from China in the commercial and productive level of Mexico and Spain between 1580 and 1620. The paper questions the traditional image of an Asian trade defined by expensive, manufactured goods, oriented to an elite consumption. Considering the Memorial of Horacio Levanto (1620) and in the context of modern globalization, we propose the hypothesis that Asian trade responded to mass consumption, influencing productive structures in New Spain and Spain herself. Madeja silk from China was one of the main semi-processed goods imported via Acapulco which, as raw material, promoted the development of the Novohispanic textile industry.

This article discusses the available sources of information on the value and volume of Peru’s exports and estimates the current value of exports, the index of export prices and the quantum of exports using a wide variety of sources. By relying on several sources, I estimate the first complete series of the current value of exports for Peru for 1830-1930. Importantly, I adjust other studies’ estimates by taking into account the deficiencies of foreign sources and by distinguishing between exports of specie and of minerals. The estimations show that exports experienced substantial growth in the 1850s and 1860s, during the Guano Era. Exports stagnated in the 1870s and dropped during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) before recovering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially during World War I.

The question of whether the possession of an empire under a regime of free trade was beneficial or not to Britain has become a serious matter of dispute in recent years amongst British and American economic historians. Nonetheless, as some of them recognise, the question they are asking is hardly a novel one: they are often consciously reviving, in a more sophisticated form, a controversy which was already dividing contemporaries in Britain at the time the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts were repealed in the late 1840s and which only lost its relevance when decolonisation began in earnest in the late 1950s. O'Brien and Davis and Huttenback are on the side of those who traditionally disparaged the economic value of empire and saw it as the preserve of special interests: Edelstein and Offer, though careful not to justify empire, are more willing to accept that the nation as a whole might have benefited materially from its possession even if the benefits were very unevenly spread. The discussion, though ingenious and highly informative has, however, been somewhat narrowly focused. So, in the latter part of the paper, it is suggested that a full assessment of the value of the empire to Britain depends upon taking account of a wider set of circumstances than has usually been evident in the current debate. In this respect, present day historians may have something to learn from the contemporary controversy where the question of the material costs and benefits of empire was always considered in the context of the social and political trajectory of the British nation.

This paper illustrates the spread of Jean-Baptiste Say's entrepreneur theory in Spain –a last contribution within the French tradition in which Richard Cantillon and A. R. J. Turgot were predecessors. We attempt to demonstrate that this is a special case, because, even though J. B. Say was the most important author from a publishing point of view, his economic theory of entrepreneurship had very little influence. The spread of economic ideas by way of translation and Spanish authors which employed J. B. Say's economic theory, give possible explanations to a paradox which had left economic policy without a theoretical reference. We analyse how Say's entrepreneur theory was received among Spanish authors in the 19th century, its degree of comprehension and the analytical additions made, and attempt to identify the real source of transmission.

In this article, we present an analysis of the institutional evolution of firing in Spain. We explain how a certain path-dependence has been created by historical accidents and how this is the mechanism behind the current system of a costly employment at will. The incentives of firms, workers and governments to sustain such a system are also discussed. We show the main inefficiencies of the system: a substantial increase in severance pay, a distorted use of the legal framework, and limitations to give a rapid answer to a big negative shock. Finally, we discuss how the unemployment benefits reform of 2002 can be understood as the culmination of Spain's policy of costly employment at will.

Historiography has payed less attention to imports than exports from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I. On the one hand, this is explained by the crucial and more visible part that exports played in fostering economic growth. On the other, the reason why imports have been less studied is the high level of disaggregation of the data available. In this paper, we analyse the official Argentine statistics as the main source for a reconstruction of imports. Then, we recalculate the balance of trade using our corrected export series. Additionally, we propose a research agenda based on gaps in the specialised literature and the possibilities given by the use of the official statistics.

After a brief description of the initial development of Venezuela's crude oil industry, this paper examines the impact the 1932 US tariff on crude oil imports had on the country. The US tariff on crude oil imports stabilised domestic crude oil prices but prevented consumers from benefting from lower prices in refned petroleum products. The large us international integrated crude oil companies gained from higher crude oil prices for their domestic production while supplying their european markets with mostly cheap crude oil from their newly developed Venezuelan oilfelds. The tariff increased the Venezuelan oil industry's vulnerability to international events because it narrowed the competitive edge it had over domestic us crude oil production. consequently, the Gómez dictatorship in Venezuela at the time became more dependent on the oil companies operating in the country since they could reduce production considerably, or even leave the country as quickly as they entered with a negative impact on government revenues.

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.

Historians have generally considered the fiscal documents relative to the payment of Direct Contribution, not very useful as a source to study the Bue nos Aires economy. In this paper the quality of these documents for the year 1839 is evaluated. It was verified that, at least for this year fiscal statements contain valuable information that can be employed to approach different aspects of the rural economy of Bue nos Aires in a period for wich we lack alternative statistical sources. In the paper we also offer some conclusions for the Argentine economy using a new set of data gathered from the information included in the documents of the Direct Contribution.

Durante la primera mitad del siglo XX, es decir, antes de que el viajar a nuestro país se convirtiera en un fenómeno de masas, el Estado español no fue indiferente con respecto al turismo. Es cierto que su desarrollo no fue nunca algo prioritario para las autoridades, pero por la importancia social, cultural, política y, sobre todo, económica del turismo, todas las administraciones públicas que se sucedieron a lo largo del período se preocuparon por fomentarlo y controlarlo. Aunque, naturalmente, no siempre con los mismos medios, ni con los mismos instrumentos, ni, por supuesto, con el mismo éxito. La etapa más interesante de cara al desarrollo del turismo fue la de la Dictadura de Primo de Rivera. Hasta que se produjo el levantamiento militar, la actuación de la Administración pública en materia turística había sido bastante limitada.

En época reciente, los historiadores han empezado a reexaminar la función del Estado colonial en la dirección de las relaciones politicas, económicas y sociales del Imperio español en América. En el caso del Virreinato del Perú, gran parte del interés se ha centrado sobre la administración de Francisco de Toledo (1569–1582), principal arquitecto de los sistemas administrative, laboral y fiscal del reino durante los años formativos del siglo xvi. Des-de su llegada a Perú en 1569, Francisco de Toledo procuró establecer cierto orden en aquel turbulento virreinato, incrementando el poder del Estado con objeto de reestructurar las relaciones entre españoles y amerindios, y canalizar hacia España el flujo de riqueza económica excedente. Algunos estudios recientes sobre el período de Francisco de Toledo se han apartado del análisis de los cambios legales e institucionales atribuibles al virrey, para fijarse en el impacto socioeconómico de sus reformas. Un aspecto que los historiadores no han tratado todavía con la atencion debida, sin embargo, es el papel que desempenaron el fraude y la incompetencia burocráticos en la evolución general del Estado colonial bajo Francisco de Toledo.