This paper studies the process of labour market formation in the tourism industry in Spain. Results show that tourism regions diverged in their capacity to attract local labour, a factor that led to different compositions of the workforce. In the most dynamic regions, circular migration became a key factor as a result of housing shortages, seasonality and labour policy. Tourism agents promoted these flows by different mechanisms such as recruitment at origin and temporary accommodation. Migration benefited growth of firms, natives' upward mobility and migrants' accumulation of capital. However, inequality in the regional labour market and host society increased.

Studies in the sociopolitics of archaeology have shown patterns of inequality in publishing. Because this inequality affects the richness of perspectives on the past, the extent of unevenness requires continual documentation. This article explores gendered and institutionally based patterns of authorship in prominent archaeology journals, archaeology papers in general science journals, and Sapiens, a public-facing web magazine, from 2016 to 2021. We find that the representation of women is similar across these two types of journals, for authors both in the United States and abroad. Men still publish significantly more than women though the gap is narrowing due to the publication activity of recent PhDs. Using a large database of PhDs as a baseline for comparison, we find that women publish less in these venues than expected, resulting in an imbalance. Some archaeology programs have a larger presence in journal publishing than others, but this imbalance is not as pervasive as what has been observed in hiring practices. Archaeology journals exhibit healthier measures of diversity, compared to Science, in terms of the institutional affiliation of authors.

Anthropological research has long theorized that emergent food-producing economies catalyzed high levels of inequality in human societies, as evident in the earliest use of jewelry made from gold, copper, and other precious minerals among early agricultural populations. Although the US Southwest appears to have been an exception, we report the discovery of two Basketmaker II period necklaces constructed of green iridescent scarab beetle femora, which suggests a homologous association between emergent agriculture and inequality. Drawing insight from ethnography, archaeology, entomology, and evolutionary ecology, we hypothesize that these and other jewelry items of Basketmaker II culture were visually prominent, honest signals of socioeconomic capital that emerged during a period of surplus food production and incipient wealth accumulation. It appears that Basketmaker II societies—like other emergent food-producing economies around the world—grappled with the opportunities and challenges that arise with surplus production, albeit in a distinct way that involved visually striking insect and feather adornments as status signals. Archaeologists may have previously overlooked this behavior due to Western biases that privilege precious metals and minerals as prestige objects and archaeological biases that tend to view insects as food or agents of site disturbance.

Even though a vast literature has addressed perceptions and beliefs on taxes, progressivity and redistribution, few studies have specifically studied the perceptions of economic elites in this regard. This group is relevant for its affluence and influence, and therefore elites’ ideas and preferences have a major impact on tax-policy configuration. This study analyses the perceptions of the economic elite on redistribution and progressivity in Chile. Based on in-depth interviews and historical documents, such notions are examined by mixing concrete evaluations of income tax and value-added tax (VAT) and more general attitudes towards the role of the tax system in economic development. Results show that redistribution is negatively evaluated, which coexists with a strong willingness to contribute to poverty relief through social initiatives outside the state. Additionally, progressivity is sidelined while highlighting growth, tax neutrality, and incentives to entrepreneurship as the main priorities of tax design. The historical analysis shows that although the Chilean tax regime has always been based on indirect taxes and levies on natural resources, neoliberal reforms and ideological renovation during the Pinochet dictatorship narrowed the general framework of tax ideas among business and political sectors and reversed progressive advances in inequality reduction and direct taxation that had been made during the previous decades.

This paper engages with and aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the role of economic and political elites in inequality dynamics and their reproduction over time. We reconstruct the distribution of wealth employing a sample of wills from the El Colegio de Sonora database covering the period of 1871-1910. We show that the rapid industrialisation and modernisation process that occurred in northern Mexico during the late-19th and early-20th centuries led to a continuous increment in wealth concentration at the top of the distribution. The Gini index measure of 0.58 for the 1871-1885 period rose to 0.80 in 1901-1910. Rather than a natural or «Kuznetsian» inevitability fundamental (kuznetsian) necessity, however, our subsequent analysis of the wills of the upper classes suggests a critical role played by the political economy at the time and highlights the importance of control over natural resources on inequality dynamics.

This paper sheds light on a crucial period of Spanish economic history, analysing changes in intergenerational occupational mobility. We use newly collected empirical evidence from Valencia, a region that followed a path of growth based on agrarian capitalism focused on international markets. We show that occupational mobility improved between 1841 and 1850, but that this situation reversed during the following decades. The opportunities offered to individuals from poorer families quickly disappeared. Put in international perspective, occupational mobility in Valencia was far lower than in other European countries, where both downward and especially upward mobility were considerably higher. By 1870, Valencia had become a polarised society, where the lowest part of the income distribution suffered increasing pauperisation and downward mobility.

This article emerged as the human species collectively have been experiencing the worst global pandemic in a century. With a long view of the ecological, economic, social, and political factors that promote the emergence and spread of infectious disease, archaeologists are well positioned to examine the antecedents of the present crisis. In this article, we bring together a variety of perspectives on the issues surrounding the emergence, spread, and effects of disease in both the Americas and Afro-Eurasian contexts. Recognizing that human populations most severely impacted by COVID-19 are typically descendants of marginalized groups, we investigate pre- and postcontact disease vectors among Indigenous and Black communities in North America, outlining the systemic impacts of diseases and the conditions that exacerbate their spread. We look at how material culture both reflects and changes as a result of social transformations brought about by disease, the insights that paleopathology provides about the ancient human condition, and the impacts of ancient globalization on the spread of disease worldwide. By understanding the differential effects of past epidemics on diverse communities and contributing to more equitable sociopolitical agendas, archaeology can play a key role in helping to pursue a more just future.

El presente trabajo pretende explorar un aspecto pasado por alto por la literatura de historia económica comparada entre Argentina, Australia y Canadá: el capital humano. Mediante la comparación con estos países en los años de la Primera Globalización, analiza los stocks de capital humano con los que contaba la Argentina durante fines del siglo XIX y la primera parte del XX, y realiza un aporte principal: la Argentina del período presenta un problema de desigualdad regional (y de persistencia de esa desigualdad) ausente en el resto de las “economías de reciente poblamiento”.

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.

Southern and central regions of Argentina moved from being relatively poor in the sixteenth century to being the richest in the country today. Although there is some evidence of this reversal, the process of regional growth in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century is, in the main, unknown. In this paper, we present an estimation of the GDPs of Argentina's 25 provinces in 1914: this is the first consistent estimation of this variable for any period before the 1950s. Our results confirm that in 1914 the city of Buenos Aires and some districts in Patagonia had the highest per capita GDP, and a comparison with the available data for 1953 shows strong persistence in incomes per capita in this period; sectoral analysis of provincial GDPs suggests that growth in the leading districts was driven by economies of agglomeration in some cases and land abundance in others.

This article analyses the evolution of nutritional inequality in Spain among cohorts born between 1840 and 1964. With male height data (N = 358,253), the secular trend of biological well-being and intergenerational anthropometric inequalities are studied based on the coefficient of variation, height percentiles and socioeconomic categories (students, literate non-students and illiterate). The results reveal that the nutritional inequalities were very large in the mid-19th century. Anthropometric inequalities diminished among those born between 1880 and 1919 and increased again, although only moderately, from the cohorts of the 1920s. From the 1930s there was a cycle of sustained increase in height. Despite nutritional improvement, the data suggest that nutritional inequalities increased during the Franco regime, affecting the low-income population segments particularly.

Using the coefficient of variations for heights, this paper examines the evolution of net nutrition inequality in Argentina from 1875 to 1950. It uses various samples of recruits and soldiers, previously gathered by the author. Evidence points to two important findings: (a) export-led growth led to stable or declining net-nutrition inequality; while import-substituting industrialisation generated significant net nutrition inequality; and (b) the highest levels of inequality in net nutrition took place during this latter phase in large urban, industrialised areas.

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.

Cohabitation is a distinctive feature of low-income groups in Latin America. In the past, it has been linked to colonial legacies including notions of familial honour, poverty, and a kinship system focused on blood ties. By contrast, some scholars consider rising levels of cohabitation in the present day to be an effect of modernisation, through increased gender equality. The present research, based on life histories of young, poor, urban co-habitees in Chile, aims to show that rising cohabitation is linked to targeted social policies and also to declining patriarchy, which is distinct from gender equality.

Based on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009, and by analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinos in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. For this, two social situations are addressed. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their task. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city.

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy believe that it has always had very high levels of inequality. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions that help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. This paper argues to the contrary. Compared with the rest of the world, Latin American inequality was not high either in pre-conquest 1491 or in the post-conquest decades following 1492. Indeed, it was not even high in the mid-19th century just before Latin America’s belle époque. It only became high thereafter. Historical persistence in Latin American inequality is a myth.

This paper explores the inequality of numeracy and education by studying school years and numeracy of the rich and poor, as well as of tall and short individuals. To estimate numeracy, the age-heaping method is used for the 18th to early 20th centuries. Testing the hypothesis that globalization might have increased the inequality of education, we find evidence that 19th century globalization actually increased inequality in Latin America, but 20th century globalization had positive effects by reducing educational inequality in a broader sample of developing countries. Moreover, we find strong evidence for Kuznets’s inverted U hypothesis, that is, rising educational inequality with GDP per capita in the period until 1913 and the opposite after 1945.

This paper presents a first estimate of income inequality in the Southern Cone of South America (Brazil 1872 and 1920, Chile 1870 and 1920, Uruguay 1920) and some assumptions with regard to Argentina (1870 and 1920) and Uruguay (1870). We find that income distribution was relatively high on the eve of the first globalization boom. Thus, inequality is not only the result of globalization, but also a structural feature. Inequality increased between 1870 and 1920, both within individual countries and between countries. Globalization forces do not result in obvious outcomes. Rather, the effect of globalization on inequality depends on the expansion of the frontier and institutional persistence and change in old and new areas. Inequality was clearly high in the wake of the globalization process. This was a particular kind of inequality, which was part of a set of institutions closely linked to the exports of primary goods, sluggish technological change and limited human capital formation.

Focusing on education–income anomalies, in which a richer country delivers less education than a poorer country, seems a promising way to harvest a part of the rich history that does not lend itself to econometrics. To test the chain of alleged causation from unequal power and wealth to poor schooling, one must follow the public money, or lack of it, in as many contexts as the data will allow. Public funding for mass schooling is the hitherto untested middle link in the chain. The key to Latin America’s poor schooling was the failure to supply tax money, not gender discrimination or any shortfall in market demand for skills. The most glaring anomalies were the Venezuelan and Argentine failures to supply the levels of tax support for mass schooling that their high income could have afforded.

This paper attempts to contribute to the ongoing debate on the historical roots of the high economic inequality of contemporary Iberian America. Our approach, which is basically empirical, departs from the mainstream scholarship. We show new data on wages and heights in several viceroyalties that (1) suggest relatively medium-to-high levels of material welfare among the commoners in Bourbon Hispanic America; and (2) allow us to build indexes of economic inequality. An international comparison of those indexes casts some doubts on the widely accepted view that Viceroyal America’s economy was exclusively based on extremely unequal or extractive institutions, as it has been popularized by the influential works by Engerman and Sokoloff and Acemoglu et al.