This paper examines educational inequality in nine Latin American countries at the sub-country level from the 1950s to the 1990s. Educational inequality is measured by the difference in schooling years between the taller and the shorter half of the female population. Schooling years significantly increased across birth cohorts, especially before the 1980s, regardless of socio-economic stratum, region or country. However, educational inequality persisted. This finding reflects the achievement of the import substitution industrialisation era in educational development and its failure in mitigating the unequal distribution of education rooted in Latin America's social structure. Trade liberalisation and educational expansion are found to reduce educational inequality in capital and urban regions, whereas democracy and tax reform increased it. By contrast, educational inequality in rural regions was hardly influenced by policy changes. This finding urges future explorations into whether the persistence of educational inequality in rural regions is due to endemic social structure.

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.

This paper addresses the relationship between the development of the concepts of autarky and «economy of the extended space» in the German-speaking world and the framing of economic relations between Germany and Brazil in the 1930s. According to this «autarkic» way of conceiving economics, in order to thrive, an economy has to be autonomous regarding its supply of necessary inputs. Proposals presented in the Annual Reports transmitted to the German Foreign Office by German diplomatic representatives in Brazil encouraged, for example, the negotiation of bilateral trade agreements and the expansion of the Brazilian production of strategic inputs for Germany. The choice of Karl Ritter, an expert in economic matters, as ambassador to Brazil is also representative of this strategy.

This paper analyses economic interaction in Castilla del Oro (Panama) at the beginning of the 16th century. By applying network analysis to fiscal records, the paper reconstructs, represents and tests business networks in the mining sector and how they became more complex with the arrival of emigrants and the appearance of new gold deposits. Results show a dynamic population with a high mobility degree despite the adverse geography and the inexistent communications.

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.