Between 1810 and 1940, a large GDP per capita gap appeared between the industrial core and the poor periphery, the latter producing, increasingly, primary products. Over the same period, the terms of trade facing the periphery underwent a secular boom then bust, peaking in the 1870s or 1890s. These terms of trade trends appear to have been exogenous to the periphery. Additionally, the terms of trade facing the periphery exhibited relatively high volatility. Are these correlations spurious, or are they causal? This Figuerola Lecture, to be given at Carlos III University (Madrid), argues that they are causal, that secular growth and volatility in the terms of trade had asymmetric effects on core and periphery. On the upswing, the secular rise in its terms of trade had powerful de-industrialization effects in the periphery. Over the full cycle 1810–1940, terms of trade volatility suppressed accumulation and growth in the periphery as well.

We present the yearly evolution of the Spanish income velocity of money (M2) and we explain its behavior from 1850 to 2000. The Spanish income velocity of money displays a downward trend until 1973 and shows the expected U-shaped pattern at the end of the twentieth century. An international comparison shows how the Spanish trend change occurs with a lag due to the late industrialization. We estimate the determinants of the velocity—the inverse of the demand for money—for the period 1850–1997. A cointegration analysis and an error correction model investigate the importance of the institutional variables in explaining the long-run behavior of the income velocity of money in Spain. The findings reveal a greater stability in the long-run velocity model when the institutional variables are considered.

This paper analyses the attempts of the Spanish state to regulate industrial relations in the early 20th century. The main conflict being over union recognition, workers faced strong opposition from employers, which generated a situation in which all possible agreements to end strikes were unstable. Faced with an increasingly active labour movement, the state tried to regulate industrial conflict but hesitated to apply state authority to force recalcitrant employers to recognize unions. A transitory system was in place for more than 20 years in which the state and employers clashed over the issue of the freedom to work and the state selectively applied its coercive power to force employers to give up on some of the strikers' demands. Tracing the role of authorities in strikes, I show how the intervention of state officials in strikes granted workers at least the partial satisfaction of their demands. I finally argue that state intervention in industrial conflict fuelled the radicalism of both unions and employers' associations.

Based on anthropometric data and descriptive information contained in the records of the Rio de Janeiro city jail (Casa de Detenção), this paper explores patterns of change in living conditions during the nineteenth century. The research shows that there were significant changes in the heights of prisoners over time and according to race and nationality.Most importantly, heights of Brazilian-born slaves declined for the cohorts born in the 1830s through the beginning of the 1860s. In addition, differences in heights for natives of the city of Rio de Janeiro and for other Brazilian prisoners provide evidence of an «urban penalty» in stature during this period. Poor nutrition, the high cost of food and shelter, the movement of some slaves out of the city and into plantation work after 1850, and urban epidemics are assessed as the factors influencing trends in prisoner heights. Throughout the analysis, height trends discovered in Rio de Janeiro are placed in international comparative perspective.

The importance of political institutions in the economic performance of developing countries is generally overlooked. Argentine economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries relied on the production of rural exports. The production structure in agriculture was supported by the widespread use of tenancy contracts. This paper uses spatial analysis and logistic regression to study the role of Congress in shaping tenancy legislation for the period 1912 to 1943. The finding is that legislative reform was a product of how political institutions worked in Congress providing veto power to Conservatives over the proposals of Radicals. Electoral fraud in the 1930s stopped tenancy legislation and gave rise to revolutionary changes in the 1940s.

This paper discusses the economic performance of three Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) from a comparative perspective, using as a benchmark a group of four developed countries (France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States). The focus is on the relative performance within the region and between the Latin American countries and the developed countries in the period 1900–1980. The paper argues that Argentina and Uruguay benefited from a privileged position in international markets at the beginning of the 20th century and this allowed them to converge. However, they failed to adjust to the major long-run change in the pattern of world trade brought about by World War I and the Great Depression, which implied a persistent decline of their export markets. On the other hand, Brazil, after having been much less successful until 1930, grew at higher rates thereafter based on rapid structural change and the building up of competitive advantages in new industrial sectors. The more vigorous Brazilian policy for industrialization and export diversification may explain why Brazil succeeded in changing its pattern of specialization, while Argentina and Uruguay were locked in to the old pattern. A typology of convergence regimes is suggested based on the growth experience of these countries.

In 1921 Mexico produced a quarter of the world's petroleum, making the country the second largest producer in the world, but by 1930 it only accounted for 3 per cent of production. To date, the debate surrounding this decline has relied mainly on events taking place in Mexico. Very little attention has been paid to developments elsewhere in the petroleum industry, except in Venezuela. Practically no attention has been paid to the reasons for the rise of oil output in Mexico. The massive changes which took place in the petroleum industry during the Great War years and its aftermath and especially the shortage of oil which occurred on world markets between 1918 and 1921 have been neglected. These events are crucial in order to understand the initial rise of the Mexican oil industry and help to understand the subsequent sudden decline.

It has often been argued that large landowners formed the core of the Buenos Aires' economic elite during the first half of the nineteenth century. According to this interpretation, the crisis of independence forced the colonial wealthiest capitalists to move from commerce to ranching, which soon emerged as the elite's major source of income. The evidence produced in this article suggests that this interpretation requires revision. Analysis of sucesiones (probate records) for a sample of fifty of Buenos Aires' largest capitalists of the central decades of the XIXth century indicates that, rather than concentrating on rural production, wealthy porteños sought to diversify their assets. This article suggests that this pattern on investment emerged as a result of businessmen's attempts to cope with economic and political instability.

In 1821 a clearly modern tax reform was undertaken in Buenos Aires. Ancien Regime taxes were suppressed and it was created a system which included usual assessments related to international commerce, but also direct taxes on capitals, in order to diminish the dependence on duty customs and to distribute the fiscal weight in a more equitable manner, by taxing proprietors in proportion to their wealth.

In these work, we reconstruct fiscal series, showing the little weight of the «Contribución Directa» over fiscal income. Also we study some attempts to improve this tax collection, which failed once and again.

Finally we try to explain those failures and the reasons to maintain a regressive tax system which, nevertheless, was efficient and brought lesser political costs than direct taxes.

Price statistics and, in particular, food price statistics are much more abundant that those of consumption. In this article we use price statistics to analyze the qualitative variations in consumption and, specifically, the diet composition, a variable which is difficult to observe, but has remarkable implications in the evolution of living standards, health and mortality. Our analysis focuses on the years between 1910 and 1912, in a period of important changes in Spanish mortality, in order to analyze the provincial variation in the level and structure of food prices. The estimated relative price indexes suggest significant regional differences in diets which should be taken into account in living standards and mortality studies.

The study of the Irati hydroelectric company aims to show some of the business strategies behind the first stages of the development of electricity in Spain and, in turn, pose new questions regarding the factors and conditioning elements of the country's regional industrialization processes. In fact, this firm represents one of the many possibilities electricity brought to non-industrialized Spanish regions at the start of the 20th century. The electricity generated by its falls explains the creation of Spain's largest integrated industrial complex built up around the initial processing of timber (saw-mills and chemical distilling) and its commercialization (railways), along with the sale of its energy surpluses on the most important market in the region of Navarre. Furthermore, the analysis of this latter activity allows us to offer an explanatory model that is both an alternative and a complement to the classical model —that provided by the largest firms—concerning the progressive incorporation of the traditional electrical markets into the integrated markets of the major Spanish companies.

This paper exposes the main issues involved in the development of a new and authentic Spain Consumer Price Index for the period of 1830 to 1936. The different sections in which it is arranged are focused on defining the field of study and scope to be analyzed, the sources and methodology used, as well as the similarities and differences in respect of other currently available indexes. It also contains a first and brief analysis of the results. The most outstanding characteristic of the new CPI from a long term perspective is its high stability, only once broken in a significant way during the 1914–1920 years, under the influence of World War I. The yearly growth rate for the whole of this period did not even reach 1 per cent, even though there was a change of level observed during the noted brief inflationary spike.

This paper exploits sectorial growth accounting methodology in a similar way to Jorgenson, Gollop and Fraumeni (1987) in order to provide additional insight into the sources of Spanish economic growth. We measure the contribution of intermediate inputs, capital, labour and total factor productivity to the increase in total output for 25 productive branches. We also analyse sectorial contributions to overall productivity growth and discuss the role of pioneering sectors in the whole transformation. The findings presented attribute more than fifty per cent of output growth to improvement in TFP. This productivity growth was unevenly distributed and was fuelled by some potent manufacturing industries together with advances in transportation and communications.

This paper proposes a new interpretation for a main issue of modern Spanish monetary history. The Spanish legal monetary system became bimetallist, as result of the Figuerola Decree, in 1868. The bimetallist system in force throughout the XIXth Century allowed the Bank of Spain, as the Bank of France did, pay its notes with silver, gold or both. As a result there was neither an inconvertibility declaration, nor any imaginary gold standard was abandoned in 1883. Law and legal practice always guaranteed convertibility of the peseta, that can't be identified only with gold exchange. In Spain there was never a suspension of tender notes convertibility such as in Italy, Portugal, Austria or France.

Among the British travellers who travelled across Spain in the eighteenth century, Alexander Jardine and Joseph Townsend were those whose itineraries were the most complete and who paid more attention to socioeconomic analysis. Their identification of the specific economic problems coincides broadly with those of Spanish economists, and particularly with those of Campomanes, whose work is considered by them as a basic point of reference. However, there are discrepancies between the travellers and Spanish economists in respect to the general economic situation, the political system and certain government attitudes still based on a mercantilist approach. The reformist gradualism of Spanish economists clashed then with the proposals of the more profound socioeconomic reforms recommended by our travellers. Moreover, the optimism of Spanish economists about growth possibilities of the Spanish economy faced up to the negative overall view of British travellers.

This study looks at the international impact of leading economics journals published in Spain. For this purpose data were collected on the number of times that articles published in Spanish journals are cited in international journals on the ISI Journals lists. Constructing these kind of impact factor enables us to stablish a new ranking of Spanish leading journals arising from their international impact. This has been a neglected aspect in previous work that constructed impact factors for Spanish academic journals. Finally, the comparison of the results with those obtained for the leading Italian, French or German journals consents us to identify the basic elements which favour the internacionalization of these national economics journals.