This article analyses the biological welfare and inequality of the male population of the irrigated area of Valencia between 1859 and 1939. It studies the effects that the agrarian development process had on physical welfare and the relationship between height and access to land ownership. Height data for conscripts in five municipalities constitute the source for the study. The results reveal that there was a growing trend in the evolution of heights in the irrigated area of Valencia at the beginning of agrarian capitalism. Nutritional inequalities can be observed between farmers and farm workers: land owners were taller than landless labourers. However, this biological inequality diminished over the period under study.

Over the last few years, the idea that some of the central problems of Latin American development are a consequence of the excessive power of the elites has regained influence. Nevertheless, this neoinstitutionalist approach has been criticized because of its excessive determinism and the fact that it doesn’t pay enough attention to the periods when elite’s power was eroded. The present paper analyzes one of these cases, which occurred in Chile between 1913 and 1973. The income share of the top 1% is used as a proxy for the elite’s power. New quantitative evidence on incomes for different groups –the 1% and wage earners– is integrated into an analytic narrative on the conflictive relation between the elite and other political and social actors.

This article analyzes sovereign debt defaults in four Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico—for the period 1870-2012. The impact of sovereign defaults on real GDP growth is generally short-lived, while the impact in terms of output losses is deep and lasts long. Defaults in the period 1972-2012 show a deep and long-lasting impact compared to defaults in earlier periods. Moreover, the length of the contraction that follows a default is associated with favourable international conditions in the run-up to a default, while the depth of the contraction is associated with an expansive domestic economy in the run-up to a default. The results fit with boom–bust theories and sudden stop models.

This article examines the mortgage credit market of Peru during the guano era and analyses the effects of the creation of mortgage banks on the allocation of credit. It shows that mortgage banks served as interregional intermediaries and facilitated access to long-term credit for large estate owners. However, banks did not broaden access to credit. As private lenders, mortgage banks loaned largely to Lima’s merchants and renters and to hacendados from the main coastal valleys.

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.