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Drawing on a large database from the register of inhabitants of Madrid, this article confirms that the literacy levels of internal migrants moving to the Spanish capital city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were higher than that of those who remained in their provinces of origin. This article also explores the different factors influencing the nature and intensity of the selection process. The empirical exercise stresses that the stock of previous migration was a fundamental factor in allowing less literate individuals to join the migration process as well. Interestingly, distance to Madrid hardly affected the profile of male migrants, but it was a strong influence on female migration, although its importance diminished over time. Lastly, the results presented here show that other internal destinations were attracting different types of migrants, often resulting in negative self-selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial Mexico’s economy experienced a long phase of growth during the eighteenth century. Around 1800, silver exports and fiscal surplus remittances from the colony rose to unprecedented levels. We study the contribution of the Spanish imperial state’s policy to the expansion of silver production and the leading role of mining in economic growth and its fiscal implications. We find evidence to support a more favourable view of both the mining sector and the imperial state than that commonly presented in the literature. The interruption of colonial ‘mining-led growth’ helps to explain the ‘lost decades’ for the economic development of Mexico after independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the economic development of Basque, Spain in 1876-1936. According to the author, the principal obstacle to Spanish economic development during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the persistence of profound structural problems in the dominant agricultural sector. The refusal to implement far-reaching agrarian reform, in particular the redistribution of landed property, meant that the performance of Spain's embryonic and uncompetitive industrial sector became inextricably bound up with the fortunes of traditional agriculture based on the monocultivation of wheat, the vine and olives on dry lands which gave some of the lowest yields in Europe. Nevertheless, as generations of Spanish businessmen were to discover to their own cost, the policy of relying on the unrepresentative and inefficient political elite in Madrid to help solve their problems was fraught with all kinds of risks. The Basque region of northern Spain, with its coastal location adjacent to the Bay of Biscay, proved initially the ideal site for exploitation.