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La historia de los niveles de vida en Argentina a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX requiere precisiones sobre los patrones de consumo de las clases populares para poder construir índices de precios que permitan transformar variables nominales en reales. Existen diversos ejemplos de conjuntos de ponderaciones de los distintos tipos de gasto en las familias obreras en Argentina, sin embargo, esas proporciones no son coincidentes.Este artículo analiza informes editados por el Departamento Nacional del Trabajo que publica los resultados de encuestas de gasto familiar en la Capital Federal realizadas durante los años 1907, 1908, 1911, 1912 y 1933 y analiza la evolución de los porcentajes de gasto de los principales rubros de consumo, sus variaciones en el tiempo y el impacto sobre ellos de los distintos niveles de ingresos y del tamaño de la familia.Sobre la base de esos análisis, el estudio se propone estimar las curvas de Engel para los períodos 1907-12 y para 1933. Los resultados sugieren que el porcentaje de gasto en alimentos se reducía a medida que el ingreso por adulto equivalente familiar aumentaba y que, para un dado ingreso, el porcentajede gasto en alimentos aumentó significativamente en la década de 1930 en relación al período anterior a la IGM. The history of the standards of living in Argentina between the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century requires the knowledge of households’ consumption patterns which are the base for elaborating adequate price indices. The literature has proposed several sets of weights for the different kind of goods consumed by working-class households in Argentina in this period and they are not always coincidental.This article presents a new dataset of households expenditure of working class families collected by the Departamento Nacional del Trabajo in the years 1907, 1908, 1911, 1912 and 1933. With this infor-mation, we suggest some hypothesis about the evolution of the expenditure shares of the main items of consumption, its variations in time and the impact on them of the different income levels and the size of the family.The estimation of the Engel curves for the periods 1907-12 and for 1933 suggests that the percentage of food expenditure was reduced as the income per adult equivalent of the family increased, but, for a given income, the percentage of food expenditure increased significantly in the 1930s in relation to the period before the WWI. Esteban Nicolini agradece el apoyo financiero del Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación español a través del Proyecto ECO2011-25713, del CIUNT través del subsidio 26/F410 y de la Universidad del Norte Santo Tomás de Aquino.

Trabajo presentado a Iberometrics VIII: Eight Iberian Cliometrics Workshop. Organizado por el Institute of Advanced Research in Business and Economics (INARBE) de la Universidad Pública de Navarra, en colaboración con Glocred y expertos de instituciones de España y Portugal. Celebrado en la Upna el 20-21 de abril de 2017. Regional inequality in living standards is a major social problem in the very top of most of the political agendas worldwide. However, their origins and ultimate causes are far from clear. In this paper we propose a new strategy to measure living standards in the long run based on the Unsatisfied Basic Needs approach (the Historical UBN – HUBN). Using data on education and housing from census and Statistical Yearbooks from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century we present a description of population’s standards of living in Argentina and Spain (with some notes to Uruguay) with an unprecedented high level of spatial disaggregation. The first finding of this paper is that the correlation among the different dimension of our HUBN and between the HUBN and other contemporaneous variables linked with standards of living (like average incomes or inequality) are usually the expected ones suggesting that the HUBN is capturing relatively well some dimension of poverty levels. The second finding of the paper is that the geographic distribution of the standards of living one hundred years ago is remarkably similar to the one dominant nowadays. This very high levels of persistence suggests that regional inequality of standards of living is extremely resilient to policy interventions and reinforces the hypotheses related with geographic determinants and/or strong levels of path dependence.

Research on the history of inequality in pre-industrial economies has focused mainly on either wealth or income inequality. The most common problem with wealth inequality is the lack information about the bottom of the distribution while the main problem with income inequality is the lack of data to characterize the top of the distribution. Given that in general these approaches are based in different kinds of sources and methodologies, the results are not easy to compare and the links between the two distributions are difficult to establish. In this paper we use a unique data set for different regions of Spain circa 1750 and present results (the first for any pre-20th century economy) of inequality of both income and wealth for the same sample of households. Information of wealth comes from probate inventories while information of income comes from the Ensenada Cadastre. The main results of the paper are that poor households are not completely absent from our data set of inventories, that the position of a household in the distribution of income is closely associated to its position in the distribution of wealth and that an increase of a household¿s wealth is associated to a less-than-proportional increase in the household¿s income., Área de Historia e Instituciones Económicas, UPO, Preprint

Most research on the history of inequality in pre-industrial economies has focused on either wealth or income. Characterizing the distribution of wealth (resp., income) is problematic owing to insufficient information about the distribution's low (resp., high) end. Because the sources and methodologies differ between these two approaches, their results are not readily comparable and it is difficult to establish links between the respective distributions that result. In this paper, we shall use a unique data set for different regions of Spain circa 1750 and present results - the first for any pre-20thcentury economy - on both income and wealth distributions for the same sample of households. Information on wealth and income is derived from (respectively) probate inventories and the Ensenada Cadastre. Our main findings are that poor households are not entirely absent from the data set of inventories, that a household's position in the income distribution is strongly correlated with its position in the wealth distribution, and that increases in a household's wealth are associated with less thanproportional increases in its income.

The economic performance of Argentina in the long run is quite usually divided in two periods: in the first one (1870-1914) we observe openness, low levels of public intervention and rapid growth in relative terms, while in the second (1914-1970) we observe relative economic slowdown together with inward looking policies and higher levels of public intervention. While there are many reconstructions of the evolution of main macroeconomic variables at a national aggregate level since the second half of the nineteenth century and many descriptions of the sectorial dimensions of this process, the available information about its provincial or regional dimensions is very scarce. In this paper we present an estimation of the GDPs of the twenty four provinces in Argentina in 1914 which is the first consistent and comparable estimation of this variable for any period before the 1950s. Our results confirm the standard view that most of the economic activity at the end of the period of the first globalization is located in the central area of the country and, in particular, in the province and city of Buenos Aires which seems to have been a quite important pole of economic activity; however, we also show that some peripheral areas in Patagonia, with very low population density, are quite affluent in per capita terms suggesting that resource abundance was an important factor to explain levels of income per capita. The comparison of the relative incomes per capita of the provinces in 1914 with the available data for 1953 suggest a remarkable stability and indicates that in this period there were no signs of reversal of income but rather persistence or even divergence.

The study of monetary phenomena and the understanding of price determination in Modern Europe are too often limited by the scarcity of good-quality data sets on the evolution across time of variables like money holdings, income, or wealth. In this paper we show that the information contained in probate inventories can be extremely useful to circumvent that problem. In particular, combining a data set of 114 inventories from Palencia (North of Spain) between 1750 and 1770 with census information (Catastro de Ensenada) we make a cross-section estimation of a money demand which is the first one ever produced for any period before the 19th century. The results provide meaningful insights about the relation between money demand and wealth, urbanization and structural change in a pre-industrial economy and highlight the potential of probate inventories to improve our knowledge of the monetary history of Modern Europe.

The study of monetary phenomena and the understanding of price determination in Modern Europe are too often limited by the scarcity of good-quality data sets on the evolution across time of variables like money holdings, income, or wealth. In this paper we show that the information contained in probate inventories can be extremely useful to circumvent that problem. In particular, combining a data set of 114 inventories from Palencia (North of Spain) between 1750 and 1770 with census information (Catastro de Ensenada) we make a cross-section estimation of a money demand which is the first one ever produced for any period before the 19th century. The results provide meaningful insights about the relation between money demand and wealth, urbanization and structural change in a pre-industrial economy and highlight the potential of probate inventories to improve our knowledge of the monetary history of Modern Europe.

This paper shows that the interaction between economic and demographic variables in England before the onset of modern economic growth did not fit some crucial assumptions of the Malthusian model. I estimated a vector autoregression for data on fertility, nuptiality, mortality and real wages over the period 1541-1840 applying a well-known identification strategy broadly used in macroeconomics. The results show that endogenous adjustment of population to real wages functioned as Malthus assumed only until the 17th century: positive checks disappeared during the 17th century and preventive checks disappeared before 1740. This implies that the endogenous adjustment of population levels to changes in real wages -one of the cornerstones of the Malthusian model- did not work during an important part of the period usually considered within the "Malthusian regime".

We claim that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the seventeenth century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in preindustrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis, we show that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock and land fertility, and higher production per acre. We analyse this dynamic interaction using an overlapping generation model and show that the evolution of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern.

We claim that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the seventeenth century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in preindustrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis, we show that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock and land fertility, and higher production per acre. We analyse this dynamic interaction using an overlapping generation model and show that the evolution of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern.

This paper describes the balance-of-payments dominance as a growth constraint to the Argentinian economy and briefly characterizes the unbalanced productive structure of the country as its main cause. Also, understanding that under this constraint domestic economic cycles depend on external shocks, auto-regressive vectors are used to characterize the short-run impact of these shocks on GDP, trade balance, and real wages. Results confirm that there is a bottleneck in the trade balance that blocks future growth possibilities, that GDP and wages are highly sensitive to variations in the terms of trade, that the increase in external debt does not produce economic growth or improvements in the purchasing power of the population, and that there is a vicious dynamic between capital flight and foreign debt. At the same time, there is evidence of the increase in external vulnerability since the change in the accumulation model in the 1970s. Fil: Catelén, Ana Laura. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales; Argentina.

La investigación sobre desigualdad de la renta en una economía pre-industrial es un asunto de gran complejidad debido a la falta de datos adecuados. En esta investigación se utiliza una base de datos creada a partir del Catastro de Ensenada. Se trata de una herramienta única y de gran potencial que permite entender mejor la dinámica y evolución de la desigualdad. En este estudio se realiza un análisis basado en la construcción de distribuciones contrafactuales de los ingresos para ver qué ocurriría en la desigualdad en una sociedad pre-industrial como Castilla la Vieja a mediados del siglo XVIII. Se contrastan diferentes hipótesis sobre la evolución de la inequidad planteadas por Van Zanden (1995). Además, se examina el comportamiento de las ratios entre rentas de la tierra o rentas totales y el salario de los trabajadores no cualificados ante cambios en la distribución de ingresos, con objeto de probar su validez como proxies de la desigualdad. Los resultados obtenidos parecen indicar que las hipótesis de Van Zanden analizadas no producen grandes cambios en la desigualdad de la renta con excepción de la disminución de los salarios reales. En cuanto al desempeño de las ratios, aunque se mueven en la dirección correcta, sobreestiman en gran medida los cambios producidos en la desigualdad, lo que sugiere que su comparación con el índice de Gini no es muy adecuada. Máster en Crecimiento y Desarrollo Económico. 2014/2015