We present the yearly evolution of the Spanish income velocity of money (M2) and we explain its behavior from 1850 to 2000. The Spanish income velocity of money displays a downward trend until 1973 and shows the expected U-shaped pattern at the end of the twentieth century. An international comparison shows how the Spanish trend change occurs with a lag due to the late industrialization. We estimate the determinants of the velocity—the inverse of the demand for money—for the period 1850–1997. A cointegration analysis and an error correction model investigate the importance of the institutional variables in explaining the long-run behavior of the income velocity of money in Spain. The findings reveal a greater stability in the long-run velocity model when the institutional variables are considered.

The importance of political institutions in the economic performance of developing countries is generally overlooked. Argentine economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries relied on the production of rural exports. The production structure in agriculture was supported by the widespread use of tenancy contracts. This paper uses spatial analysis and logistic regression to study the role of Congress in shaping tenancy legislation for the period 1912 to 1943. The finding is that legislative reform was a product of how political institutions worked in Congress providing veto power to Conservatives over the proposals of Radicals. Electoral fraud in the 1930s stopped tenancy legislation and gave rise to revolutionary changes in the 1940s.

It has often been argued that large landowners formed the core of the Buenos Aires' economic elite during the first half of the nineteenth century. According to this interpretation, the crisis of independence forced the colonial wealthiest capitalists to move from commerce to ranching, which soon emerged as the elite's major source of income. The evidence produced in this article suggests that this interpretation requires revision. Analysis of sucesiones (probate records) for a sample of fifty of Buenos Aires' largest capitalists of the central decades of the XIXth century indicates that, rather than concentrating on rural production, wealthy porteños sought to diversify their assets. This article suggests that this pattern on investment emerged as a result of businessmen's attempts to cope with economic and political instability.

This paper exposes the main issues involved in the development of a new and authentic Spain Consumer Price Index for the period of 1830 to 1936. The different sections in which it is arranged are focused on defining the field of study and scope to be analyzed, the sources and methodology used, as well as the similarities and differences in respect of other currently available indexes. It also contains a first and brief analysis of the results. The most outstanding characteristic of the new CPI from a long term perspective is its high stability, only once broken in a significant way during the 1914–1920 years, under the influence of World War I. The yearly growth rate for the whole of this period did not even reach 1 per cent, even though there was a change of level observed during the noted brief inflationary spike.

This paper exploits sectorial growth accounting methodology in a similar way to Jorgenson, Gollop and Fraumeni (1987) in order to provide additional insight into the sources of Spanish economic growth. We measure the contribution of intermediate inputs, capital, labour and total factor productivity to the increase in total output for 25 productive branches. We also analyse sectorial contributions to overall productivity growth and discuss the role of pioneering sectors in the whole transformation. The findings presented attribute more than fifty per cent of output growth to improvement in TFP. This productivity growth was unevenly distributed and was fuelled by some potent manufacturing industries together with advances in transportation and communications.