Independence from Spain was a complex movement of civil confrontation and long and cruel wars of liberation. Human lives were lost, assets destroyed, capital fled, slavery abolished and public issues left to inexpert administrations, but at the same time there was an important reduction in the...

This paper provides a comparison between Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s treatments of poverty in a capitalist society. The comparison focus on the different arguments they use to relate poverty to inequality and institutional realities. The discussion points out the life experiences of each...

La historia económica de Panamá durante el siglo XIX es bastante desconocida en Colombia y la de sus cuentas fiscales es un laberinto difícil de entender. Esta investigación enfrenta ambos problemas, recurriendo a la demografía, a la geografía y a los presupuestos del Estado Soberano de...

This paper seeks to understand from a regional perspective the causes of the civil war of 1876-1877 in the Northeastern Colombian Andes. An approximation is made to the urban hierarchy in the current Colombian departments of Santander and Norte de Santander between 1853 and 1875. The conditions...

This article analyzes the tax revenues of the Colombian central government and those of the federal states between 1850 and 1882. It aims to determine whether political decentralization of revenues and expenditures favored and improved the fiscal sustainability of Colombia during this period....

In an earlier essay (North, 1981, Ch. 3) I developed a “Neo-Classical Theory of the State”. This essay elaborates, extends and modifies that essay in three directions: 1. It incorporates time into the model; 2. It is explicitly concerned with the perceptions –the belief systems? that...

This article studies the disentailment of mortmain in Colombia. Most of this land was held by the Catholic Church, which derived considerable economic and political power from its ownership. The Radical faction of the Liberal Party, which governed the country between 1863 and 1876, promoted...

This article measures Nueva Granada’s GDP before its Independence, analyzes its economic growth during 1785-1810 and considers some hypothesis about its continuity in the 19th century, with an ending reference point in 1905. These measures are used to make international comparisons with other...

Current theories of the State would benefit from a new look at the economic role of the State in the work of the great economists of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Schumpeter’s central theme of technological innovation for long-term economic growth makes his work particularly interesting to...

En este artículo se calcula la frontera de distribución en Colombia con datos de las matrices de oferta y utilización de productos de 2005 a precios corrientes usando un modelo de capital circulante basado en Sraffa, Pasinetti y Muñoz y Riaño. La frontera se calcula con salarios ex ante y...