IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17020.html

American treasure and the decline of Spain

Author

Listed:
  • Charotti, Carlos Javier
  • Palma, Nuno
  • Pereira dos Santos, João

Abstract

Spain was one of the world's richest countries around 1500. Two centuries later it was a backwater. We rely on a synthetic control methodology to study the long-run impact of the in ux of silver from the NewWorld since 1500 for the economic development of Spain. Compared with a synthetic counterfactual, the price level increased by up to 200% by the mid-seventeenth century. Spain's GDP per capita outperformed other European nations for around a century, but by 1750, GDP per capita was around 40% lower than it would have been if Spain had not been the first-stage receiver of the American treasure.

Suggested Citation

  • Charotti, Carlos Javier & Palma, Nuno & Pereira dos Santos, João, 2022. "American treasure and the decline of Spain," CEPR Discussion Papers 17020, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17020
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17020
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Arteaga, Fernando & Desierto, Desiree & Koyama, Mark, 2024. "Shipwrecked by rents," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    3. Yao Chen & Nuno Palma & Felix Ward, 2026. "Goldilocks: American Precious Metals and the Rise of the West," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 72(1), February.
    4. Adam Brzezinski & Nuno Palma & François R. Velde, 2024. "Understanding Money Using Historical Evidence," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 16(1), pages 571-595, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • N13 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • O11 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
    • O57 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17020. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.