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Accounting for the Reversal of Fortune: Spain and Britain, 1501-1800

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  • Prados de la Escosura, Leandro

Abstract

Recent research confirms that per capita income in early modern Spain improved onlymarginally overall, while also revealing sustained growth through much of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside a continued decline from the late sixteenth to the midseventeenth centuries. These phases shaped Spain's relative position within Western Europe and contributed to the Reversal of Fortune. This paper finds that labour productivity, proxied by output per working-age population, improved during the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century, then declined until the mid-seventeenth century, and that thesubsequent recovery never reached the levels of the 1570s. What caused these episodes of growth and decline: changes in resource endowments or in the efficiency of their use? Phases of labour productivity growth were often driven by factor intensity, but efficiency losses underpinned periods of stagnation or decline, which contradicts the stylised view that factor intensity is the main driver of labour productivity in a pre-industrial economy. Compared with Great Britain, Spain showed an inverse, divergent pattern, moving from similar levels to less than half of Britain's by 1800. Efficiency was the main driver of the widening gap. Ingenuity appears, therefore, to be the driving force behind the Reversal of Fortune.

Suggested Citation

  • Prados de la Escosura, Leandro, 2026. "Accounting for the Reversal of Fortune: Spain and Britain, 1501-1800," IFCS - Working Papers in Economic History.WH 50135, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Instituto Figuerola.
    • Handle: RePEc:cte:whrepe:50135
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    Keywords

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    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • N13 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence

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