The paper explores the relationship between language and economy, between text and context, through a case study: the Basque region in northern Spain during World War I and the immediate postwar years. Using some tools of quantitative and qualitative analysis, I try to dissect the process of...

The very different factor endowments of the New World to those found in Europe implied that the wine industry developed its own style and characteristics. In California production was located at a considerable distance from the main markets on the East Coast, and trade was initially controlled...

The paper analyses the legal transfer of formal rules regulating stock markets in Spain between 1800 and 1936. We argue that the transfer of French legislation in the 1830s provoked a “transplant effect”, which generated serious distortions in Spanish financial markets. As a result, Spain...

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...

Public finance is a major feature of the development of modern European societies, and it is at the heart of the definition of the nature of political regimes. Public finance is also a most relevant issue in the understanding of the constraints and possibilities of economic development. This...

La crisis de 1921 cerró bruscamente en la economía española el ciclo bélico que había comenzado a mediados de 1915. En este trabajo se ofrece una primera aproximación al impacto de esta crisis internacional sobre la economía de una región industrializada de la periferia, el País Vasco....

This article is in line with the United Nations attempts to approach human development in wider terms than per capita GDP, and in line with an ever lively debate on the historical standard of living and on the role of inequality in development. We focus on three Mercosur countries (Argentina,...

This paper relates the changes in the structure of the Portuguese economy to changes in wage inequality, during 1944-1974, when Portugal had its golden age of growth under a dictatorial regime. We present a new wage data set based on surveys conducted by the Portuguese Statistics Office (INE)....

Latin America is the most unequal region in the world and there is a lively debate concerning the explanations and timing of such high levels of income inequality. Latin America was also the region, not including European Offshoots, which experienced the most rapid growth during the first...

In the first age of rapid economic growth after 1945, fluctuations of western European output and employment were so mild that the very notion of a cycle was transformed or even seemed obsolete. A second period of much slower average economic growth was marked by large and frequent oscillations,...