This essay aims to introduce an issue of the RHE-JILAEH dedicated to the reconstruction of historical trade statistics of Latin American countries. It comments on the early perceptions of the quality and utility of historical trade statistics and on the way in which more recent analyses have overcome the distrust that prevailed until the last third of the 20th century. It then summarises the different criteria and methodologies that have been used to assess the accuracy and reliability of trade statistics in order to make them useful for the purpose of reconstructing new, more complete and precise trade series or re-estimating those available. The introduction ends with a brief description of the contents of this volume.

After the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia the issue of how to develop a backward economy towards a socialist society took pre-eminence. The relationship between agriculture and industry was one of the key issues. In this respect, the Left Opposition argued in favour of a Big Push for industrialisation financed through the exploitation of the peasantry, while the Right Deviation defended adjusting industrial growth to the development of the agricultural surplus. The First 5-Year Plan meant the complete victory of one of these positions. Unfortunately, all discussions were banned subsequently, the leading figures of these two factions were expelled from the Party and many of them executed. Yet, this problem was of the utmost importance for underdeveloped countries, as Development Economics was to discover 25 years later. This new branch of Economics would have benefitted greatly from the lessons of the Soviet experience regarding industrialisation, as well as from the theoretical discussions surrounding it.

This article examines Argentine relations with multilateral agencies and bankers during the first years of the last military dictatorship. It begins with an overview of relations and the external situation before the rise of the military and why a new economic team sought and restored Argentine credit standing. There follows a review of how links with the U.S. Treasury and international institutions lost significance and how cross-country financial intermediation, carried out mainly by leading state banks, gave foreign bankers a key role in the financing of Argentina’s foreign exchange needs. It also emphasises explicit and underlying motivations in the behaviour and policies of all actors involved and offers an evaluation of former Minister Martínez de Hoz’s efforts to justify these policies in the early 1980s.

This paper aims to evaluate the accuracy of official Bolivian foreign trade statistics. Results show large discrepancies between Bolivian records and those of its main trade partners during the First World War. Whereas the gap decreased thereafter, it stayed particularly high in the case of exports. This seems to be explained by mistakes in the geographical assignment by the trade partners rather than by an overvaluation of official Bolivian figures. This suggests that landlockness may have had a significant negative effect on the accuracy of trade statistics from the, a priori, more reliable countries. The study also helps to revisit the debate concerning the effect that tin exploitation had on the rest of the Bolivian economy during the first half of the 20th century.

This article explores the economic issues related to financial crises at insurance companies, using an example from the Great Depression, the National Surety Company. National Surety was a large and diverse American insurance company that experienced a major crisis in 1933 due to losses from its guarantees of mortgage-backed securities. I find that policyholders were able to stage a massive run on the company by demanding the return of their unearned premiums. A key dynamic of the crisis was that policyholders at an insurance company have a dual role as holders of liabilities and as providers of income. In addition, I establish that government officials believed National Surety to be systemically important, due to the size of its insurance business and because many of its counterparties were societal actors that these officials sought to protect. As a result, the New York State Insurance Commissioner used emergency powers to reorganize the company, with the goal of providing continuity to its business lines outside mortgage-backed security insurance.

The British monetary authorities have traditionally focused on broader monetary aggregates than their counterparts elsewhere. The reasons include: the willingness of UK banks to allow customers to make payments by drawing on time deposits, the particularities of the UK approach to managing the national debt and the foreign exchange reserves, and the flow-of-funds system of national accounts developed after World War II. This article outlines these reasons, and explores the implications for the UK's often fractious relationship with the International Monetary Fund during the 1950s and 1960s. It explains why IMF conditionality on loans to the UK focused on broad aggregates.

Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographical isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that prehistoric geographical isolation has been beneficial to development because it has contributed to contemporary cross-country differences in financial intermediary development. The relationship is robust to alternative samples, different estimation techniques, outliers and varying conditioning information sets. The established positive relationship between geographical isolation and financial intermediary development does not significantly extend to stock market development.

This article makes a contribution to the empirical and methodological discussion on the standard of living in Latin America during the colonial period. It presents evidence obtained from primary sources on the evolution of nominal wages, cost of living and real wages for 10 occupational categories in the region of Montevideo between 1760 and 1810. The results place rural laborers and masons in Montevideo below subsistence levels until at least the first decade of the 19th century, a finding that is difficult to reconcile with the demographic and productive growth of the region at the same time. Wages may not be the main component in the structure of family income among the subordinate sectors of the colonial Río de la Plata.

Labour market transformation and inequality were fundamental aspects in the transition to the industrialisation. This article reconstructs the Barcelona’s area economic structure across the 18th and 19th centuries through the Marriage Licences of the Barcelona’s Cathedral. These documents registered a proportional tax paid by the spouses’ according to their occupational and social status. Since 1780, an important decrease in the primary sector and an increase in the secondary and tertiary sectors are observed. Inequality between economic sectors rose and also within the secondary sector (textile) due to the proletarianization of the workers. Conversely, there was not an increase in inequality in the primary sector while it decreased in the tertiary sector.

This article presents, for the first time, a continuous series of value of Honduran exports and imports for the period 1880-1930, extending the series previously available from Notten (2012). The new series were constructed based on the official statistics of the main trading partners of Honduras (United States, Great Britain, Germany and France) corrected from Honduran and complementary sources. The correction criteria applied are based on the results of a previous reliability validation exercise. The data obtained allow to delimit a new chronology of the foreign trade of Honduras where the “export age” began before the banana export boom that took place between 1903 and 1930.

In 1821 Mexico achieved its independence from Spain. What happened in the following 50 years has become a field of dispute for economic historians. The lack of reliable quantitative information in many fields of economic activity has led to contrasting interpretations, none of which has been accepted as definitive. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the yearly values of Mexico’s foreign trade in that period, with the purpose of providing elements to start filling this significant gap in Mexico’s historiography. It relies on official trade statistics and consular reports from Mexico’s main trading partners. It provides new series of imports and (commodity and specie) exports, and a provisional view of the balance of trade for most of the 1821-1870 period.

Historiography has payed less attention to imports than exports from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I. On the one hand, this is explained by the crucial and more visible part that exports played in fostering economic growth. On the other, the reason why imports have been less studied is the high level of disaggregation of the data available. In this paper, we analyse the official Argentine statistics as the main source for a reconstruction of imports. Then, we recalculate the balance of trade using our corrected export series. Additionally, we propose a research agenda based on gaps in the specialised literature and the possibilities given by the use of the official statistics.