This article presents a comparative analysis of the productíve performance of the modern Spanish iron and steel industry from its origins up to the Spanish Civil War. Three aspects are examined: the extent to which the industry had the potential to compete in world markets, whether or not Spanish mills applied new technologies to re-establish or maintain their competitivity and which elements limited or increased the advantage of their products. The analysis shows a revealed advantage in products intensive in iron ore. Part of this advantage can be traced back to preferential ore supply contracts. The limits to these preferential contracts introduced incentives for maintaining the reduced scale of Spanish installations. The attempt to gain control over home markets on behalf of Altos Hornos de Vizcaya may be related to these contractual limitations. The high profíts reaped through the cartelisation of the industry and the wide margin of benefit obtained by producing within the scale of the preferential ore supply contracts provide an alternative explanation for the industry's performance in the period.

Did the late industrialization in Europe’s periphery improve life for its urban class? This paper examines family living conditions in northern Spain during late industrialization in the interwar period. We concentrate on the Basque region, one of the emerging industrial areas from the 1870s on. Historiography holds that in the medium-term urban development and industrialization increased real wages and overall standards of living. We contrast this empirically by examining the effects of income shocks on families using high frequency data from 1914 until 1936. These contrasts introduce nutritional adequacy of family diets as an additional way of measuring living conditions. Our results indicate that real income did not improve and that demographic and social deprivation variables were highly responsive to short term economic shocks. This response points to the fragility of urban breadwinner families even during later phases of industrialization; the urban penalty was by far not being compensated by the higher nominal wages received.

RESUMENEl propósito de este trabajo es el de proporcionar un análisis comparativo de la actuación empresarial productiva de la moderna industria siderúrgica española desde sus inicios hasta la Guerra Civil Española. Se estudian tres aspectos: en qué medida la industria tuvo el potencial para competir en los mercados mundiales, si las fábricas aplicaron las innovaciones que podrían haber reestablecido o mantenido su competitividad e identificar los elementos que limitaban o incrementaban la competitividad de sus productos en el exterior. El estudio muestra una «ventaja revelada» de los productos intensivos en mineral de hierro. Parte de la ventaja comparativa provenía de contratos preferenciales de suministro de mineral. A su vez, estos contratos eran limitados e introducían unos fuertes incentivos para no aumentar la escala de producción. El origen de la captación de los mercados nacionales por parte de la empresa dominante, Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, podría residir en esta limitación...

This paper presents first results of our more recent research on the Bilbao stock exchange from its foundation in 1890 up to the Spanish civil war. We examine the stock market's origins and follow its evolution over the first half century of existence. To this end we introduce ...

Contrasting the iron law of the principle of comparative advantages as the determinant of the international division of labour has attracted dissidents to the international trade paradigm over the years. Spanish Bessemer steel is an outstanding comparative advantage enigma which stands to be resolved. Spain possessed important reserves apt for ore specific Bessemer processing. Depletion of existing deposits in industrial Europe and the increasing demand for this resource endowment made this all the more relevant. This paper examines if Spain could have or should have become one of Europe's major producers of Bessemer steel.

The paper analyses the development of regulation and microstructure of stock markets in Spain until the Spanish Civil War. It examines the transfer of French legislation in the 1830s and its implications for the final configuration of the regulatory framework. It studies the ...

--------------------------------- This analysis questions whether or not Biscay was an optimal location for Spanish integrated steel mills at the end of the century and tries to determine Spain's optimal site as coal found substitutes all throughout the twentieth century. The contrast of ...

Debo admitir que me ha costado reconocer mi hipótesis de trabajo, su contraste y mis conclusiones tal y como aparecen reflejadas en la nota que publica Antonio Escudero en este número. Trataré en pocas líneas de centrar el debate de nuevo en el tema de mi artículo y explicar algunos de los aspectos que pueden haber llevado a una lectura confusa de mi investigación.

This paper would like to analyse how Swedish i ron and steel entrepreneurs reacted to the strains of increasing competition on world markets which affected the industry between 1870 and 1940. It implicitly searches for readjustments taken by the sector as a whole in order to increase productivity. A first part of the paper presents the breakdown into periods and the background to the transitions we are going to examine. We then go on to describe the data we have assembled for the contrast both from national accounts and complementary sources. We contrast the coherence of the data series by estimating total factor productivity with a primal and a dual approach and by looking at factor substitution and relative prices. Next we examine the contribution to growth of the different inputs: labour, capital, resources and TFP. We find evidence for the industry reacting to competitive strains and overall we find TFP as the main responsible force.

This analysis questions whether or not Biscay was an optimal location for Spanish integrated steel mills at the end of the century and tries to determine Spain's optimal site as coal found substitutes all throughout the twentieth century. The contrast of the correct location of Spain's main production center is relevant, because a wrong location could have been introducing the inefficiencies and redundant costs which may have made Spain lose its competitivity on international markets and could have been biasing the competitivity of its products to low coal consumption. The suspicion of a mistaken location has been cornmented upon by a number of Spanish historians and economists. The first part of this paper will introduce the relevant aspects for formalizing a model for the location of integrated steel mills; together with sorne specific considerations for the case of Spain. Part two will show the methodology applied, Le. the under1ying assumptions, the model of transport cost minimization and the calibration of parameters. The contrast of the model will be completed by combining each of the two alternative sources of coal with the different iron ore sites respectively. Each combination will give us the numerical results presented in the next section. We will be able to observe how the reduction of coal consumption affects the optimal location for each of these alternative combinations of inputs. At the same time it will be easy to identify 'the supreme site' given the overall tendency to reducing the weight of coal as an input. Our preliminary conc1usions were then scrutinized by introducing the different aspects exc1uded from the mode1. Uniform transport costs were questioned and the alternative of sea transport was cüntemplated. Scope economies, such as port capacities, ore transportation costs, and labor and capital availability were considered in order to question the results we have obtained. Our final conc1usions are that Bilbao was second-best, but that Gijón as a feasible alternative never really existed. Locating Spain's principIe steel mill in Bilbao guaranteed its technical drive to reduce coal consumption and sealed the loss of natural hegemony once its ore reserves depleted.

We constructed a unique data set including price and trade volumes for the Bilbao Stock Exchange (BSE) in the interwar period in order to calculate two alternative market indices (weighted and unweighted). The characteristics of the weekly returns on the market portfolio and trading volumes are analyzed in order to test the existence of various phenomena typical of emerging markets, such as autocorrelation and high persistence of volatility shocks, and other features of advanced markets, such as the riskreturn relationship and the relationship between trading volumes and returns. The methodological approach is based on an augmented GARCHcumvolume model. We find strong evidence in favour of autocorrelation and GARCH effects, no evidence of riskreturn relationship, and weak evidence of a contemporaneous impact of trading volumes on returns. These findings are generally in line with the results obtained by recent studies on emerging markets.