This research note documents the revision of a dataset of real wages in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela during 1920-2011. This resource was originally published by this journal in Astorga (2017). The revision affected all eighteen basic wage series plus six weighted-average series, with varying degrees of modification. The revised dataset is made available as supplementary material. Regardless of changes to the data, the key findings and conclusions of the 2017 paper still hold.

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.

This paper discusses and documents a new data set of real wages for unskilled, semi-skilled and relatively skilled labour in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela (LA-6) over the period 1900-2011. Three interrelated aspects are examined: the wage growth record associated with periods dominated by a particular development strategy; developments in the wage share of income; and movements in skill premiums and their links with fundamentals. The key findings are: (i) the region’s unskilled wage rose by 147 per cent compared to rises of 254 per cent in the average wage and 440 per cent in income per worker (including both property and labour income); (ii) the average LA-6 wage share started a secular fall in the 1950s; (iii) skill premiums tended to peak during the middle decades of the 20th century, coinciding with the acceleration of industrialisation and the timing of the demographic transition. Movements in the terms of trade are broadly associated with both fluctuations and trends in wage premiums, though the direction of the link is country and time specific.

This article estimates the social savings of the railroads in Peru in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The construction of railroads made it possible for Peruvians to substitute the traditional system of mules and llamas, although only for a few routes. Using primary and secondary sources, I estimate the social savings for 1890, 1904, 1914 and 1918. Social savings ranged between 0.3 per cent and 1.3 per cent of GDP in 1890, but then increased to a range between 3.6 per cent and 9.4 per cent of GDP in 1918. The social savings of railroads in Peru were comparable to those for the United States and Great Britain but were much lower than those for Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, largely because Peru had very few railroads.

This paper uses the theoretical and empirical contributions of recent international literature on the determinants of long run economic growth to explain the historical origin of the enormous regional economic inequalities which characterize Colombia. The results indicate that geography and culture are not direct determinants of differences in regional per capita income. Nevertheless, geography did play a central but indirect role through its influence on settlement patterns during the colonial period. Although econometric estimations indicate that the colonial legacy influenced contemporary differences in regional income, it is not clear if this effect operates via the institutions or human capital.