The purpose of this article is to examine the accounting and auditing in the Spanish Royal Household between 1561 and 1808. The Royal Household was the third most important item of expenditure that the State Treasury financed, after the Army and Navy and the National Debt. On studying spending control in the Royal Household, we have rejected the idea, often advanced by historiography, that there was no spending control within this institution. On the contrary, treasurers and accountants were only able to release funds for expenditure purposes on the basis of prior authorization. However, the efficiency of spending control was very limited due to technical, administrative and, above all, social and political elements.Spanish Royal Household, State Expenditure, Charge And Discharge, Spending Control, Auditing, Double Entry,
In the past decades, numerous studies have been conducted on the trade-off between guns and butter, namely defense versus social sector expenditure. The aim of this research is identifying whether indeed defense spending crowded out investment and other social expenditures as health and education. Previous research does not yield strong and unambiguous evidence of neither positive nor negative effects of military expenditure on social spending. It is striking that the guns versus butter dilemma has not been extensively studied for Spain. Using Mintz and Huang (1991)
Testing the existence of budgetary trade-offs in eighteenth-century Britain and Spain can contribute to resolve the debate on the economic impact of warfare and its relationships with the military potential of nations and the struggle for world supremacy during the early modern period. We have constructed several empirical models to search for trade-offs in order to show which country had the whip hand in achieving its military and economic objectives. Britain was ahead of Spain for several reasons. Britain was more efficient in deploying the available resources because it built an effective national bureaucracy. Furthermore, the institutional reforms made from the seventeenth century onwards increased the level of resources through enhancement of the British economy.
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