The Economic History group is composed of a researchers who focus on Uruguay's economic performance in the long run and from a comparative perspective, with an interest in specific periods and facts, and with the objective of identifying the determinants of the material progress of the society.
Lines of research:
Banking sector, credit and money
Growth, distribution and foreign trade during the First Globalization
Historical National Accounts
Regional economic performance and economic geography
Inequality in Uruguay in the long-run
Standard of living in historical perspective
Natural resources, sustainability and development in the long run
International migration: trajectories, dynamics and determinants
We present estimates of regional GDP in Uruguay during the First Globalization (from the 1870s to the years prior to the World War I). Our results show a decreasing and irregular trend in the regional inequality which is consistent with a process of income convergence between provinces. The irregularity of the trajectory would be evidence of the performance of centrifugal and centripetal forces that alternated influences during the pe-riod. The forces that tended to decentralize production were the combination of abundant natural resources suitable for livestock production throughout the territory and the reduction of transport costs that made easy access to Montevideo possible, as well as, through its port, to the global market. Centripetal forces would have responded to a process characterized by the increasing importance of Montevideo as an urban and adminis-trative center, a huge market for goods and services and a dynamic centre of labour market. In addition, in Montevideo, commercial and financial activities (and their potential for making industrial development more flexible) were increasingly important, interrupted only by the economic and financial crisis of 1890-1891. In fact, the crisis constituted one of the main equalizing forces of the period. The result was that at the beginning of the 20th century levels of regional inequality were lower than those recorded in the 1870s.
In Uruguay, information on the System of National Accounts is available since 1955, but homogeneous time-series are only offered for a shorter period (since 1997). National accounts have been calculated using two approaches: the production and the demand approach. Official estimates are available for several base years: 1961; 1978; 1983; 1988 revision, 1997 and 2005, though each benchmark was constructed from different sources and methodologies. In our research, we accept the official series for 1997 onwards and used other techniques to link the different base series prior to 1997 and back to 1955. In this paper, we focus on the demand side and we pursue two objectives. On the first place, we propose homogeneous annual time-series of gross domestic product (GDP), exports, imports, gross capital formation, household final consumption expenditure and consumption of general government between 1955 and 2016, at current and at constant prices. We employ two splicing techniques: retropolation and interpolation. In the second place, we discuss the differences between the spliced series, for each variable, in terms of levels, growth rates and expenditure structure of GDP.
This paper examines the relationship between school provision and the political power of the president in Uruguay between 1914 and 1954. The empirical analysis relies on fixed effects panel estimations based on newly compiled information about the partisan orientation of legislative members, electoral competition and schooling diffusion at the department-level. Ceteris paribus, I find an association between school provision and the need of government to capture votes or to obtain further legislative support. The resource allocation initially benefitted government’s core voter departments and shifted to favor non-loyal districts as an answer to the increasing intra-party political conflicts. Against the traditional historical narrative, the results point out to an influence of political interests on the diffusion of mass schooling and suggest the use of school provision as a pork barrel good over the period.
In this article, we discuss whether there was a single Latin American pattern of agricultural growth between 1950 and 2008. We analyse the sources of growth of agricultural production and productivity in ten Latin American countries. Our results show that the differences between these countries are too large to establish a single pattern for this region. However, certain common trends may be observed, such as the growing importance of labour productivity as a component of agricultural production growth and the increasing relevance of total factor productivity as a component of agricultural labour productivity growth.
Throughout the world, stable regional patterns relating to private savings are hard to access. This article revisits the hypothesis that, as there is evidence of emula-tion patterns between consumers, there might be international (macroeconomic) “emulation”. We test demonstration effect theories exploiting international data on savings, incomes, and means of global exposure. We use two methods of media communication given that their penetration peaked at different times in the sample period: TV and internet were a means of discovering foreign consumption standards. With the resulting country panels, we find some evidence in favour of a statistically significant negative association for the demonstration effect.
The increasing interest in economic diversification, technological sophistication, and production specialization again places structural change at the centre of the economic development theory. However, efforts to measure structural change from a long-run perspective remain scarce. We aim to fill this gap using a synthetic indicator that represents the dynamics of structural change in the long-run and allows us to identify different development patterns.
This edited collection examines the evolution of regional inequality in Latin America in the long run. The authors support the hypothesis that the current regional disparities are principally the result of a long and complex process in which historical, geographical, economic, institutional, and political factors have all worked together. Lessons from the past can aid current debates on regional inequalities, territorial cohesion, and public policies in developing and also developed countries.
In contrast with European countries, Latin American economies largely specialized in commodity exports, showed high levels of urbanization and high transports costs (both domestic and international). This new research provides a new perspective on the economic history of Latin American regions and offers new insights on how such forces interact in peripheral countries. In that sense, natural resources, differences in climatic conditions, industrial backwardness and low population density areas leads us to a new set of questions and tentative answers.
This book brings together a group of leading American and European economic historians in order to build a new set of data on historical regional GDPs for nine Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. This transnational perspective on Latin American economic development process is of interest to researchers, students and policy makers.
Coordinadores: Zeús Salvador Hernández Veleros, Daniel Velázquez Orihuela, Henry Francisco Willebald Remedios.
Con participación de Gabriela Mordecki, Adrián Rodríguez y Leonel Muinelo
En este documento se analiza la historiografía uruguaya sobre temas agrarios y rurales desde 1970 hasta la actualidad. No es un directorio de autores o contribuciones, ni presenta indicadores bibliométricos para describir la historiografía agraria de Uruguay. El argumento central de este artículo es que el auge y la caída de la historiografía rural uruguaya describen el ciclo de vida de lo que Imre Lakatos llamó un programa de investigación (Lakatos, 1983).
Este trabajo discute, con base en resultados de investigación y en un esquema analítico desarrollado por el antropólogo Tim Ingold, el punto de vista que ordena la historia de la tecnología ganadera rioplatense en una secuencia lineal de etapas evolutivas.
Hoy día es común encontrar en las páginas de los periódicos sumarios de investigaciones acerca de losefectos deletéreos de la actividad ganadera para el medioambiente, la salud pública y los animales.
Juan Carlos nunca se planteaba un problema historiográfico importante sin después abordar la investigación apelando, además de a un trabajo teórico consistente y a un recorrido historiográfico completo, a un estudio de las fuentes que pudieran medir y dar cuenta, hasta el detalle, de lo que se quería observar y analizar.
We propose different alternatives of inequality estimation for economies with a big agricultural sector where land is a decisive factor in income generation and where we do not have enough information about personal earnings.
The aim of this paper is to study the process of diffusion of the tractor in Uruguay, tracking its regional variation. For this purpose, it presents an indicator of the mechanization of agriculture in the 19 departamentos (or provinces) of Uruguay in the long term (1908-2010).