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...

This paper presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for nowadays developed countries -(pre-1994) OECD, for short-. Economic liberty expanded over the last one-and-a-half centuries, reaching two thirds of its maximum possible. Its evolution...

Comparisons of economic performance over space and time largely depend on how statistical evidence from national accounts and historical estimates are spliced. To allow for changes in relative prices, GDP benchmark years in national accounts are periodically replaced with new and more recent...

How has Latin America's wellbeing evolved over time? How does Latin America compare to today's developed countries (OECD, for short)? What explains their differences? These questions are addressed using an historical index of human development. A sustained improvement in wellbeing can be...

This paper explores the role of agriculture in Spain's contribution to the little divergence in Europe. On the basis of tithes collected by historians over the years, long-run trends in agricultural output are drawn. After a long period of relative stability, output suffered a severe contraction...

This essay offers a new set of historical GDP estimates from the demand and supply sides that revises and expands those in Prados de la Escosura (2003) and provides the basis to investigate Spain's long run economic growth. It presents a reconstruction of production and expenditure series for...

The Napoleonic Wars had dramatic consequences for Spain's economy. The Peninsular War had higher demographic impact than any other military conflict, including civil wars, in the modern era. Farmers suffered confiscation of their crops and destruction of their main capital asset, livestock. The...

This paper provides a long-run view of well-being inequality at world scale based on a new historical dataset. Trends in social dimensions alter the view on inequality derived from per capita GDP. While in terms of income, inequality increased until the third quarter of the twentieth century; in...

This paper provides a long run view of human development as a capabilities measure of well-being for the last one-and-a-half centuries on the basis of an augmented historical human development index [AHHDI] that combines achievements in health, education, living standard, plus liberal democracy,...

In assessments of modern Spain's economic progress and living standards inadequate natural resources, inefficient institutions, lack of education and entrepreneurship, and foreign dependency are frequently blamed for the poor performance up to mid-twentieth century, but no persuasive arguments...