This paper, building on new archival research and the social table method, presents comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico in 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. Inequality grew from 1895 to 1910, driven by economic expansion within the context of an oligarchic economy. While real income increased for the lower classes during this period, the main beneficiaries were large landowners and entrepreneurs. In the revolutionary period from 1910 to 1930 inequality decreased especially as a result of land reforms, benefitting peasants at the expense of the large landowners. However, the economic structure of the country was not fundamentally changed, and in the 1930s inequality raised as incomes of peasants and those in the informal sector fell behind manufacturing and other high-earning sectors. The Mexican case shows the complex interaction of economics, demography and politics in determining economic inequality.

During the military regime in Brazil (1964–1985), enrollment ratios in primary education grew substantially in the first decade under dictatorship, but stagnated in the mid-1970s. This paper shows that education spending might depend on the levels of centralisation in tax matters. Using panel data regressions and qualitative evidence, we argue that a massive big push industrialisation programme increased the pressure on external accounts, leading the government to intensify an export incentive policy based on tax subsidies that decreased the income of subnational governments. As a result, the capacity of funding mass education was compromised in the second half of the 1970s.

This study relies on a linear programming model to estimate welfare ratios in Spain between 1600 and 1800. This method is used to find the food basket that guaranteed the intake of basic nutrients at the lowest cost. The estimates show that working families in Toledo had higher welfare ratios than in those in Barcelona. In addition, the welfare ratios of Spain were always below those of London and Amsterdam. The divergence between Northern Europe and Spain started before the Industrial Revolution and increased over time.

In Latin America, Colombia stands out for its more significant and persistent rural–urban educational performance gaps. This paper studies the evolution of this under-performance of Colombian rural areas by conducting a long-term descriptive analysis of a new dataset. The results suggest that the role of the national government is a source of these educational inequalities because rural education was introduced late and deficiently. That is, the national government delayed the provision of education to rural areas. Moreover, even when implemented, these rural educational initiatives proved deficient due to their lack of funds, lower quality, curricula detached from the rural context and a design that amplified regional disparities, thus producing and maintaining significant and persistent rural–urban gaps in education.

Was there an early consumer revolution in Hispanic America? This article presents varied evidence supporting an affirmative answer to this question, especially regarding the case of New Spain. The inauguration of the Manilla Galleon trade route across the Pacific Ocean in 1565 was decisive in this respect. It made it possible that Asian goods (more or less finished silk and cotton textiles, porcelain, lacquerware, ivory religious images, furniture and spices, mainly) experienced an early diffusion throughout New Spain after arriving in Acapulco. This innovation in consumption patterns was adopted first by the elites, not much later, by the intermediate classes and, rather soon than not, by the commoners. Primary (i.e. Avalúos of the galleons' cargo) and secondary sources permit quantitatively exploring the possibilities of consumption of Asian goods by unprivileged segments of New Spain's population. We find that a non-negligible number of those goods were accessible to Mexico City labourers. Thus, it may be inferred that upper segments of society accessed it earlier and more easily. Therefore, New Spain should be included in any global narrative of the changes in consumption during the Early Modern Era.

This paper produces a new estimate of the Argentine cost of living index (COLI) for the period 1912-1943 that amends the oversights of the official series. The lack of an appropriate splice when the shares of the index's components are changed explains the divergence between the official and the Reconstructed COLIs. The 17.3 percentage-point gap for the period 1912-1943 between the official series used by the historiography and the Reconstructed COLI accounts for the oversights of the official estimate. This divergence is also evidenced when generating real wages. Hence, when Juan Domingo Perón arrived at the National Labour Department in 1943, all else being equal, workers of the City of Buenos Aires were worse off economically than the historiography assumes.

This paper engages with and aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the role of economic and political elites in inequality dynamics and their reproduction over time. We reconstruct the distribution of wealth employing a sample of wills from the El Colegio de Sonora database covering the period of 1871-1910. We show that the rapid industrialisation and modernisation process that occurred in northern Mexico during the late-19th and early-20th centuries led to a continuous increment in wealth concentration at the top of the distribution. The Gini index measure of 0.58 for the 1871-1885 period rose to 0.80 in 1901-1910. Rather than a natural or «Kuznetsian» inevitability fundamental (kuznetsian) necessity, however, our subsequent analysis of the wills of the upper classes suggests a critical role played by the political economy at the time and highlights the importance of control over natural resources on inequality dynamics.

This paper presents a new dataset of enrolment rates and grade distribution ratios (GDR) in Brazil between 1933 and 2010, in addition to enrolment rates and GDR of Brazilian states from 1955 to 2010. To our knowledge, there are no previous estimates of enrolment rates by states for such a long period in Brazil. Enrolment rates and GDR in northern and north-eastern states were meagre and comparable to the lowest Latin American performers, and even the most advanced Brazilian states lagged behind the early leaders of the region, such as Argentina and Uruguay, until the turn of the century. Given a certain enrolment rate, Brazilian states were expected to present lower GDR compared to Latin American countries on average.

Desde hace algunos años se avanza en investigaciones sobre la evolución, causas y consecuencias de la desigualdad. En ese marco, la desigualdad salarial ha recibido gran atención dadas sus implicancias en relación con las políticas económicas, el crecimiento y el desarrollo. En este artículo se presentan nuevas series y análisis acerca de la desigualdad salarial de género en la industria de la ciudad de Buenos Aires entre 1903 y 1942. Se propone cubrir un área vacante en los estudios del mundo laboral femenino, siempre complejo, y aún más en la primera mitad del siglo XX. Esta aproximación es una aportación a los estudios sobre la desigualdad de género en Argentina, que permitirá comparaciones con otros espacios y regiones.

Using social tables and modern household surveys, this article explores Brazil's income distribution from a historical perspective (1850-2010), examining its relationship with economic development and the factors driving inequality changes. It shows that Brazil's inequality was not always high, but rather followed a Kuznets curve, increasing from the early 20th century, reaching a high plateau between the 1970s and 1990s and declining thereafter. Notably, results highlight the importance of both economic and political factors for enabling the completion of the second Kuznets curve phase.

This paper gathers information on the diet of the people of Montevideo. It puts forward some hypotheses regarding the caloric intake of the plebeian and non-elite social groups, introduces two Laspeyres indexes of food prices for Montevideo in 1760-1810, analyses the movements of food prices in Montevideo in this period and compares the case of Montevideo with neighbouring cities.

This paper applies modern economic theory to the ownership of enslaved men and women in the labour market context of Santiago, Chile from 1773 to 1810. We calculate the internal rate of return for slaves by gender and age as a way to understand the economic justification of slavery in an urban scenario where free labour was also readily available. Based on archival sources documenting the selling prices for slaves, prevailing wages for free labourers, maintenance costs and life expectancy, we argue that the ownership of enslaved men and women was a consistently profitable activity.

Based on primary sources, baskets of consumption for Buenos Aires are reconstructed for the 1780-1820 period, applying current international methodologies. They build on previous work based on 1835 data. It can be seen that the consumption pattern did not vary substantially in the period and, considering the salary of both urban and rural workers, we are able to establish that standards of living were high and experienced a significant increase after 1835, especially during the 1840s. This placed Buenos Aires among the cities of the Western world with highest welfare ratio levels.

This paper aims to analyze the changes in the standard of living of workers in the popular sectors of Mendoza during the “great expansion” of the Argentine economy. A series of real wages of the construction pawn in public works is calculated for 1895–1914, in order to compare it with series of real wages of low and medium public employee grades (low-level policeman, porter and clerk) and vineyard employees, which were previously estimated. In this way, we try to know if the dynamism of viticulture and public investment improved their living conditions. In addition, it seeks to compare these results with the cost of a basic basket of goods and services and calculate family income for some construction laborers identified in the National Population Census of 1895, in order to know if they insured family subsistence.

This paper analyses the role of Mompox in New Granada's interregional trade during the late colonial period. It focuses on the value, structure and destination of exports of domestic goods from Mompox to markets on the Atlantic and the Andes. By unearthing unexplored sources, this paper provides evidence that will help to understand, indirectly, some issues such as the nature and timing of economic growth, the degree of regional specialisation and, above all, the role of inland ports in the economic geography of the viceroyalty. The paper contends, first, that the region experienced a boom–bust cycle during the late colonial period. The export of domestic goods doubled between 1770 and 1800 but subsequently collapsed during the 1802-1809 years. Second, evidence suggests that the region experienced a process of market deepening and widening. Trade flows, then, played a larger role in shaping the economic history of the region than previously thought.

This article deals with the trade of local merchandise in Santiago's district (Corregimiento) from 1773 to 1778, based on tributary sources. It contributes to the debate on the organization of the colonial internal market. The main traded merchandise, which represented about 80% of Chilean exports, came from the cattle exploitation that was developed in the haciendas around Santiago, whose cattle stocks were complemented from neighboring provinces in the Andes. The largest destination of this trade, in which big merchants acted together with a thousand minor merchants, were the retail channels and the artisan sectors supplying the population of Santiago. The impulse of this demand on the domestic market was so dynamic that it shows a degree of regional autonomy higher than what it is traditionally assumed for the Chilean economy in the late colonial period.

This paper explores the relationship between the physical stature of Colombians born during the 20th century and several socio-economic and demographic variables. Using a dataset of more than 225,000 individuals built with information from judicial background certificates, we found a sustained growth of the average height of women and men during the 20th century. The results show significant differences in stature according to gender, level of education, occupation, and place and date of birth. Similarly, health conditions and access to aqueducts significantly affect height. We found that departmental average height disparities decreased and the gap across regions closed throughout the century.

Using data from two national surveys (ENSA, 2000; ENSANUT, 2006) we assess the evolution of biological standards of living of the Mexican population born during the second half of the 20th century. Our results show that there was an improvement in living standards reflected in an increase in stature, but this amelioration was limited. We observe differences across socio-economic strata, across educational levels, and between men and women. Persistent structural inequality has been byproduct of a system of security and social protection that was limited, segmented and hampered the potentially positive effects of social-welfare policies. We corroborate the relatively modest improvement in heights by comparing outcomes in Mexico with other Latin American countries.

This paper examines educational inequality in nine Latin American countries at the sub-country level from the 1950s to the 1990s. Educational inequality is measured by the difference in schooling years between the taller and the shorter half of the female population. Schooling years significantly increased across birth cohorts, especially before the 1980s, regardless of socio-economic stratum, region or country. However, educational inequality persisted. This finding reflects the achievement of the import substitution industrialisation era in educational development and its failure in mitigating the unequal distribution of education rooted in Latin America's social structure. Trade liberalisation and educational expansion are found to reduce educational inequality in capital and urban regions, whereas democracy and tax reform increased it. By contrast, educational inequality in rural regions was hardly influenced by policy changes. This finding urges future explorations into whether the persistence of educational inequality in rural regions is due to endemic social structure.

This article provides the first series of adult male height for 19th-century Chile. Our aim was not only to assess the trends indicated by height during this period, but also the relationship between stature and both GDP per capita and exports. Having analysed our data, our primary conclusion is that there was a reduction in height for cohorts born in the 1850s and 1860s with respect to cohorts born between 1820 and 1840. Height stagnated thereafter, with small to no improvement towards the end of the 19th century, in line with other Latin American countries for which there is comparable evidence. The increase in per capita GDP and exports during the second half of the century did not result in better biological welfare, as was the case in other Latin American countries during similar export booms.