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In this paper, several historical scenarios are compared, each very different to the each other in both institutional and geographical terms. What they have in common is the relative poverty of part of the population. This approach allows combining micro historical analysis (in the Catalan case) with a macro comparative approach in developing countries. Through these micro historical and macro regression analyses we obtain the result that adult women’s skills and real wages are a key factor when we wish to explain the patterns of child labor. While female real wages increased sharply in 19th century Catalonia, we obtain very different results in the case of developing countries. This gender bias is identified as one of the very significant effects of human capital which held by women and helps to explain why in some cases children continue to work and also why some parts of the world continue to be poor according to our regression analysis.

The aim of this chapter is to present the results on the impact of ethnicity on inequality, in terms of both income and educational achievement, in the Americas (North and South). It focuses on the period of the second era of globalization, from 1960 to 2010, before debates on Brexit in Europe and the adoption of protectionist economic policies in the United States. This period was chosen because of the intensification of international trade and interaction between North and South American countries. In this context, the chapter is specifically interested in the different implications of the racial composition of the labor force for inequality measures and employment. Although unequal opportunity between blacks, whites, and indigenous peoples narrowed over the period, greater public efforts are needed to fully achieve equal opportunity.

We already stressed that the twentieth century has significantly been labeled as the human capital century, specially in North America. In this chapter we focus on Latin America in a more widely comparative perspective with other developing countries and the previous metropolis, Spain. We focus on key aspects of women and child labor market participation levels and education. While in developed regions of Spain the increase of levels of education of women and children was a process that modestly began during the nineteenth century and took place during all the twentieth century, in developing countries and more precisely in Latin America the process of educational reform was slow and began in the twentieth century. Uneducated mothers with low levels of income conceived uneducated children that were soon part of the labor force, particularly in unskilled occupations of the informal sector of the economy. But in the Latin American case there is a trend towards the improvement of women’s and children’s condition during the last third of the twentieth century. The increase of levels of education of women brought with it the decline of levels of participation of children and the improvement of demographic conditions (infant mortality and fertility) as we already stressed in Chapter 4.

In this introductory chapter, we introduce the most relevant bibliography on the main questions regarding income inequality and human capital in the Americas in the long run, as well as the demographic trends of the period outlined in Chapter 4. The chapter deals with the very different origins and evolution of income and human capital inequality in Latin America with respect to North America, specially the United States. A lot of available information dates the origins of Latin American inequality in the colonial period (Engerman and Sokoloff 2012; Acemoglu et al. 2011; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Berola and O’Campo 2013). Iberian colonizers dealt with the distribution of production factors in South America in a more unequal way than North European colonizers in North America. But Williamson (2010, 2015) argue on a different perspective stressing that levels on income per capita in Latin America were too low to allow for high levels of inequality.

In this paper we attempt to describe the general reasons behind the world population explosion in the twentieth century. The size of the population at the end of the century in question, deemed excessive by some, was a consequence of a dramatic improvement in life expectancies, attributable, in turn, to scientific innovation, the circulation of information, and economic growth. Nevertheless, fertility is a variable that plays a crucial role in differences in demographic growth. We identify infant mortality, female education levels, and racial identity as important exogenous variables affecting fertility. It is estimated that in poor countries one additional year’ of primary schooling for women leads to 0.614 childless per couple on average (worldwide). While it may be possible to identify a global tendency towards convergence in demographic trends, particular attention should be paid to the case of Africa, not only due to its different demographic patterns, but also because much of the continent’s population has yet to experience improvement in quality of life generally enjoyed across the rest of the planet.

Trends in inequality and education in the United States are well known thanks to the research and publications by Goldin and Katz (The Race Between Education and Technology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2008) and Lindert and Williamson (Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2016) among others. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, and even before (Engerman and Sokoloff in Economic Development in the Americas Since 1500: Endowments and Institutions. Cambridge University Press and NBER, New York, 2012) decentralized institutions at the local and county level and latter the States supplied public education starting with primary education and evolving to secondary and College education. Education was skill biased but supply grew at the same path than demand till the last third of the century. After the 1970s demand was higher than supply leading to the increase of inequality. Rightward political shifts, acceleration in the adoption of labor saving technologies, the massive rise in labor-intensive imports from emerging nations born by the second era of globalization and the explosion of financial activity after six decades of tighter regulation are all factors that also help to explain this last rise of inequality according to Lindert and Williamson.

In this paper we present: (1) The available data on comparative gender inequality at the macroeconomic level and (2) Gender inequality measures at the microeconomic and case study level. We see that market openness has a significant effect on the narrowing of the human capital gender gap. Globalization and market openness stand as factors that improve both the human capital endowments of women and their economic position. But we also see that the effects of culture and religious beliefs are very different. While Catholicism has a statistically significant influence on the improvement of the human capital gender gap, Muslim and Buddhist religious beliefs have the opposite effect and increase human capital gender differences. In the second global era, some Catholic Latin American countries benefited from market openness in terms of the human capital and income gender gap, whereas we find the opposite impact in Buddhist and Muslim countries like China and South Korea where women’s economic position has worsened in terms of human capital and wage inequality.

This article deals with the outcomes of changes in the family labor resource allocation for family incomes and household structures. During the first stage of the demographic transition, since women worked more than men due to child bearing and child rearing, and children were the main contributors to household incomes over the medium term, there was a substitution effect whereby women 's wage labor was replaced by that of the children. With the beginning of the second industrial revolution, a contrary trend can be observed whereby child labor was replaced by that of married women, even by those reported as housewives in the Municipal Census. A smaller number of children, mandatory schooling, and an improvement of women 's position within the factory with respect to men, all seem to explain this second substitution. As a result of all these transformations, household structures and family incomes do not conform to any pre-established norms and integrate what we have defined as a family economy of mutual a...

El presente articulo pretende arrojar un poco de luz acerca de algunos de los aspectos mas importantes de las economias familiares dentro de un contexto historico. Se ha propuesto una perspectiva analitica que enfatiza los aspectos dinamicos y flexibles de las economias, tanto en el mundo industrial y urbano, como en el rural. Al igual que para Chayanov, la relacion de productores y consumidores dentro del nucleo familiar ha sido un factor clave para el bienestar de la familia. No obstante, la economia domestica se ha mostrado flexible, adaptandose a las nuevas situaciones surgidas como consecuencia de sus realidades demograficas y economicas. La utilizacion de los recursos humanos disponibles dentro de la familia, asi como la variacion de los tipos de actividad economica forman parte esencial de estas estrategias adaptativas.

1. El mercado de trabajo. Las teorias del capital humano y de los mercados internos Si nos basamos en los manuales de teoria neoclasica tradicionales, en un sistema de mercado, el trabajo es un factor de produccion de caracteristicas similares a los demas productos. El libre juego de oierta y demanda lleva a un salario de equilibrio que depende de la tecnologia utilizada, unico factor exogeno al mercado de trabajo, que influye en la productividad y, por tanto, en la determinacion del salario. La teoria neoclasica, no obstante, se ha sofis­ticado con la teoria de la formacion de capital humano de G. S. Becker ^ La idea principal de esta teoria intenta explicar las diferencias salariales den­tro del mercado de trabajo. Estas diferencias, siguiendo al mismo autor, obedecen a los niveles distintos de cualificaron con que los trabajadores se incorporan al mercado de trabajo, niveles de cualificacion que dependen, sobre todo, del tiempo invertido para adquirirlos. Las personas cualificadas renun­ciaron en su momento a la renta inmediata que les ofrecia el mercado de trabajo, en aras de un mayor ingreso futuro. El equilibrio se alcanza cuando los ingresos futuros compensan los sacrificios presentes. Cuando la formacion es general, es decir, aplicable a cualquier empresa, el propio trabajador paga los costes de formacion. Cuando la formacion es especifica, solo util para una empresa, los costes de formacion son compartidos entre el trabajador y la em­presa, de forma que la parte pagada por la empresa no tiene ninguna inci­dencia en la curva de ingresos futuros del trabajador. En los casos en que la

La formación y crecimiento de las ciudades industriales en el siglo xix es un fenómeno característico de la transformación capitalista iniciada en algunos países de Europa. La transición al sistema fabril creaba en este período las condiciones que iban a impulsar el rápido desarrollo de las industrias urbanas. La mayor capacidad de expansión de los sectores secundario y terciario de la economía había, a partir de entonces, de alterar las pautas reguladoras del tamaño de las poblaciones, así como la distribución de la actividad entre los distintos sectores productivos. Este es un proceso controvertido que, a largo plazo, sólo podía sustentarse por los aumentos de la productividad agraria que permitiesen alimentar las crecientes proporciones de población integradas en los sectores urbanos. No obstante, desde algunas perspectivas, como la sostenida por el modelo de protoindustrialización, se ha argumentado que en el período de formación de las ciudades industriales no fueron tanto excedentes de población agraria los que integraron el crecimiento demográfico urbano, como la movilización del trabajo previamente ocupado en las manufacturas rurales. A partir del grado de detalle que permite el estudio de un ejemplo concreto, se tratará, a continuación, de poner de relieve los orígenes de la transformación industrial en una ciudad catalana, Sabadell, así como las bases de su crecimiento demográfico.