Real Wages and Relative Factor Prices in the Third World 1820-1940: Latin America.

By 1914, there were huge economic gaps between the Southern Cone plus Cuba and the rest of Latin America. When did the gaps appear? In an effort to suggest a new research agenda for the region, this essay uses a new data base on real wages and relative factor prices for seven major Latin American regions as well as for the three Mediterranean regions which were a source of so many of Latin America's immigrants (Portugal, Spain and Italy). These ten regions, plus comparative information from Britain and the United States, form the data base for the paper.