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Plenty of land, land of plenty: the agrarian output of Portugal (1311-20)
- Source :
- Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal, Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP), instacron:RCAAP
- Publication Year :
- 2015
- Publisher :
- Oxford University Press (OUP), 2015.
-
Abstract
- This article presents a benchmark for Portuguese agrarian output for the 1311–20 decade. This benchmark is built from the supply side using the value of church tithes combined with contemporary parish accounts. Two main findings emerge: first, per capita agrarian output was similar in the recently conquered South and the North, hinting that internal migration after the Reconquista led to the equalization of marginal product across the country; second, that Portuguese real per capita agrarian output was above subsistence and higher than that of contemporary England and Wales. This result, which is robust to the assumptions used, confirms that by 1320 Portugal was a “frontier economy” with a high land/labor ratio and a high per capita output. This seems to reinforce the Malthusian theory that the amount of land per person was key in determining living standards. The article discusses the implication of these results for the inequality among nations.
- Subjects :
- History
Internal migration
Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous)
Subsistence agriculture
Economic History, Agriculture, Living Standards, Frontier Economy
Agriculture
Standard of living
jel:N53
Frontier
Agrarian society
Economy
Agrarian output
Development economics
História de Portugal - séc. 14
Per capita
Marginal product
Economics
Agrarian system
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14740044 and 13614916
- Volume :
- 19
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- European Review of Economic History
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....f2ff0acd227053bcb29881dcc9e1cf0e