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
Argentine export growth before the First World War is considered one of the most relevant variables in order to understand the main characteristics of Argentina's long-run modern economic growth properly.
Capital accumulation is one of the main factors that drive economic growth. In this article we analyze
some of the cyclical characteristics of the long run evolution of capital accumulation in Uruguay using
the spectral analysis and the decomposition of time series in the period 1870-2010.
This paper analyses the principles characteristics of the monetary policy in the period 1931-1959 and its changes related to the national and international context. Two were the most important transformations. On one hand the increasing role of the Republic Bank of Uruguay in the conduction of the monetary and exchange-rate policy. On the other hand, there were important changes in the monetary regime evolving to a more flexible system as the gold standard was abandoned. In addition, we described the evolution of the monetary supply, the link with the economic activity and a first approximation to the relation between money and prices.
This article discusses the evolution of the total and social public expenditure in Uruguay during the 20th century. It analyzes the growth path of the social public expenditure and the extent up to which it could be preserved from the cyclical economic downturns and the fiscal constraints of the Public Sector. The paper finds a low long-run elasticity of public spending to GDP – leading to a slow growth of social public expenditure and a remarkable procyclical pattern of total and social public expenditure. It also shows that social spending, especially education expenditure, has often been used as an instrument to curb budget deficits. No distinctive «fiscal regimes» for the period could be identified.