Using the regional distribution of the Spanish residents patents from 1882 to 1935, the paper shows important divergences in the technology level of the Spanish regions. Those with the highest technology level were: Cataluña, Madrid, País Vasco and Valencia. The second group was formed by: Cantabria, Baleares, Aragón, La Rioja, Navarra and Asturias. Finally, the regions with the lowest technology level were: Murcia, Andalucía, Canarias, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Galicia and Extremadura. Nevertheless, the evolution of patents per capita ratio shows that while some regions improved during this period, others got backwards relative to the rest of Spain. The distribution of patents by economic sectors shows a more complete picture of the technological development of the regions: it shows the sectors in which regions specialized and those in which they achieved technical advantages.

The author searches into the reasons for the perpetuation of inefficient institutions. The monastery of Sta. Maria de Montederramo (Orense, Galicia) in the 13th century lets to underline the existence of formal and informal institutions defining agents' choices whose interests are building up in the process of social interaction. Moreover those interests emerge within socio-cultural context, rather than as the outcome of the institutional constreints over a given nature as profit maximazers. The article reviews the classical debate about the Cister. Given the Rule of the Order it is argued that Cistercians pursued the organization of coherent territorial estates, exclusive property rights over the land and own labour force. Working on the case-study, the gap between the theoretical principle of the Order and the specif management and contractual agreements about land tenancy are considered. The conclusion puts forward that monasteries were devices of accumulation because they developed practices of reciprocity, redistribution and identity within the peasant communities and through the organization of personal and social networks with some of the outstanding members of the local community. In the tied web of social and cultural dynamics, the economic patterns were hammered out.

In this article we analyze the economic organization and the management strategies developed by the cathedral council of Barcelona in the seventeenth century, and its relation with the income and expense structures that characterized the institution's finances. It is claimed that the evolution of these variables was directhy related to the organizational and managerial capacities of the council and also to the position that it occupied in the diocesan ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The objetive of this paper is to have another look at early 20th Century Santander's economy. It seems to be desirable to carry out this kind of studies for homogeneous groups, so we rearrange available data in seventeen branches of activity. Then, by using aggregate production functions, we get measurements of neutral technological progress, the degree of returns to scale and the magnitude of the elasticity of substitution.

This paper analyses those factors that determined the regional specialization of pepper crop as well as the competitiveness of its industrial product, paprika, in international markets. Thus, it focuses on the relationship between agriculture and food industry. On the agriculture side, it is emphasised the role of cultivators on pepper diffusion in some irrigable areas of Segura river and Caceres valley. The demand expansion favoured crop intensification, provoked significative changes in peasant work organization, and facilitated technological advances in small farms too. On the industrial side, the present article shows the consumption importance in the national market at the end of nineteenth century and the foreign trade in the early twentieth century. In addition, it presents how Spanish exporters became to control the international market in the 1910's in conflict with Hungarian paprika. The role of industrial and commercial firms was decisive in paprika difussion in international markets enhancing its quality and standarization. Finally, the importance of marketing in the commercialization throughout 1920's and 1930's preventing paprika adulteration is reported.

The years 1880–1914 were years of institutional growth and systemic consolidation for English banks. In the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century there had been a number of crises which had affected the banks of England and Wales. Ono effect was to raise anxieties about the liquidity of bank balance sheets, including fundamental questions about the composition of lending to the private sector. In particular, the paper discusses the procedures used by the banks to minimise risk and examines some aspects of actual lending practice as it applied to the industrial regions of Britain. There are three parts to the paper. The first briefly summarises the organisational and control structures that were introduced by the large joint-stock banks to standardise lending at their numerous branches. The second section introduces a schema for the assessment and monitoring of loans, and the third discusses some of the banks' pre-1914 practices with regard to loans to industry.