In this paper, new series of Spain’s capital stock and input are constructed for the last one-and-a-half centuries. Capital stock and input grew at average rates of 3.5 and 3.7 percent per year but not at a steady pace since rates accelerated dramatically during the ‘Golden Age’. Two major...

Between 1850 and 2000, Spain’s real income increased by about 40-fold, at an average rate of 2.5 percent. The sources of this long-run growth are investigated using Jorgenson-type growth accounting analysis. We find that growth upsurges are closely related to increases in TFP. Spanish economic...

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...

This paper examines changes in the organization of the Spanish cotton industry from 1720 to 1860 in its core region of Catalonia. As the Spanish cotton industry adopted the most modern technology and experienced the transition to the factory system, cotton spinning and weaving mills became...

We survey aggregate growth in a sample of 27 European countries during the interwar period. We discuss the available data, possible explanations for a slowdown in growth rates and test the explanatory power of several hypotheses put forward in the literature.

Este trabajo analiza el fenómeno de la crisis y auge de los grupos regionales de la banca española con una nueva metodología que permite estudiar el nivel de eficiencia y la productividad de las entidades financieras. Se han obtenido dos resultados relevantes. En primer lugar, se ha...

Con el fin de explicar las grandes diferencias de precios entre los tejidos de algodón británicos y españoles, este articulo se ocupa de medir el coste de las materias primas y estimar los niveles de productividad total de los factores (PTF) en ambos países. Ambos cálculos sugieren una...

This paper discusses how Spain’s housing markets reacted to the far-reaching changes that affected the demand for dwellings during the first phase of the rural-urban transition process. To this end, we construct a new hedonic index of real housing prices and assemble a cross-regional panel...

This paper studies the evolution of Spanish regional inequality from 1860 to 1930. The results point to the coexistence of two basic forces behind changes in regional economic inequality: industrial specialization and labor productivity differentials. The initial expansion of industrialization,...

How has wellbeing evolved over time and across regions? How does the West compare to the Rest? What explains their differences? These questions are addressed using an historical index of human development. A sustained improvement in wellbeing has taken place since 1870. The absolute gap between...