This paper suggests an alternative view of Europe’s Little Divergence in real wages. It presents a new dataset of prices and wages for Spain and proposes a new way of measuring the cost of bare-bones subsistence. The substitution of brown-bread prices for grain prices in the baskets transforms the scale and chronology of the divergence between North-western Europe and Spain. The results show that it began later and that unskilled subsistence wages in London and Amsterdam were significantly lower than those calculated by the canonical model, which would nuance the “high-wage” hypothesis.
This paper presents a new dataset on regional prices in Early Modern Spain. Earl J. Hamilton published in the American Treasure and The Price Revolution in Spain, 1500-1650 prices for the four regions in which he divided Spain-Valencia, Andalusia, Old Castile-León and New Castile-but this was not the case in War and Prices in Spain, 1651-1800. Here he printed only prices for the last region. Nevertheless, he presented indices of prices and salaries throughout the book for the three remaining regions for which the raw data is preserved in the archive of his personal papers at Duke University. Having access to the cards and worksheets where prices from primary sources were computed allows us, firstly, to recover the prices for Old Castile-León, Andalusia and Valencia and to discover how the series for each region and period were built; secondly, to test their validity for purposes other than those he sought. Finally, the prices of some selected goods for the period 1651-1800 are reconstructed, analysed and published.
Using a database of about 375,000 individual observations, which represent over two million days worked, this article studies building workers’ remunerations and how labour markets functioned in eighteenth‐century Madrid. We present new wage series that correct and improve the evidence existing in the literature and provide an explanation for the long‐run wage stickiness found in the city. Economic factors, rather than customs or guild regulations, explain why wage rates remained unaltered for about 100 years. The reconstruction of the working lives of 100 of the workers who took part in the construction of the Royal Palace of Madrid provides the first evidence of wage profiles for pre‐industrial times. They demonstrate that every wage rate was attached to a certain level of skill. Craftsmen's wages increased as they gained abilities, as human capital theory predicts, while returns to age or experience were negligible in the case of unskilled workers. This points to the existence of segmented labour markets in the building sector in early modern Spain.
This book offers a much-needed compendium of up-to-date information on fisheries subsidies and the debate on how it negates our efforts to management fisheries sustainably. It provides a time-line of the rise of fisheries subsidies to the status of core issue on the agenda of the Doha Round at the WTO. Even though the fisheries subsidies story is still unfolding, this volume provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview ofthe subsidies discussion at the globalleve!, blended with national stories from three important fishing nations in three continents: Senegal, Ecuador and Norway. I therefore recommend Fisheries Subsidies, Sustainable Development and the WTOto students of fisheries science, economics and management. The book would also be a good read for WTO negotiators and policy makers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.