Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Between Conquest and Independence: Real Wages and Demographic Change in Spanish America, 1530-1820

Contents:

Author Info

  • Leticia Arroyo Abad
  • Elwyn A.R. Davies
  • Jan Luiten van Zanden

Abstract

On the basis of a newly constructed dataset, this paper presents long-term series of the price levels, nominal wages, and real wages in Spanish Latin America – more specifically in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina – between ca. 1530 and ca. 1820. It synthesizes the work of scholars who have collected and published data on individual cities and periods, and presents comparable indices of real wages and prices in the colonial period that give a reasonable guide to trends in the long run. We show that wages and prices were on average much higher than in Western Europe or in Asia, a reflection of the low value of silver that must have had consequences for competitiveness of the Latin American economies. Labour scarcity was the second salient feature of Spanish Latin America and resulted in real wages much above subsistence and in some cases (Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina) comparable to levels in Northwestern Europe. For Mexico, this was caused by the dramatic decline of the population after the Conquest. For Bolivia, the driving force was the boom in silver mining in Potosi that created a huge demand for labour. In the case of Argentina, low population density was a pre-colonial feature. Perhaps due to a different pattern of depopulation, the real wages of other regions (Peru, Colombia, Chile) were much lower, and only increased above subsistence during the first half of the 18th century. These results are consistent with independent evidence on biological standards of living and with estimates of GDP per capita at the beginning of the 19th century.?

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/WorkingPapers/CGEH.WP_.No20.ArroyoAbadetal.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Utrecht University, Centre for Global Economic History in its series Working Papers with number 0020.

as in new window
Length: 49 pages
Date of creation: Dec 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ucg:wpaper:0020

Contact details of provider:
Postal: University of Utrecht, Drift 10, The Netherlands
Web page: http://www.cgeh.nl
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: Wages; Prices; Latin America; Early Modern Period;

Other versions of this item:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Salvucci, Richard J., 1990. "Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America. Edited by Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Pp. xiii, 419. $49.50. cloth: $," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 50(04), pages 972-973, December.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Blog mentions

As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
  1. On the Explanations of How Latin America Fell Behind
    by bearodr in NEP-HIS blog on 2012-02-13 12:19:28

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucg:wpaper:0020

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sarah Carmichael).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.