This article aims to cover an important aspect of the economic history of Porfirian Mexico: the integration of agricultural domestic markets. Because corn was the staple crop of the commercial agricultural sector, it becomes the protagonist of this story. Panel techniques are applied to a price-convergence model. Although still unfinished on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, corn market integration substantially accelerated during the Porfiriato and ended up further integrated than estimated by Kuntz. Railroads were not only indispensable to the economic growth of Mexico, but also played a key role in the process of corn market integration.

Colonial Mexico's economy experienced a long phase of growth during the eighteenth century. Around 1800, silver exports and fiscal surplus remittances from the colony rose to unprecedented levels. We study the contribution of the Spanish imperial state's policy to the expansion of silver production and the leading role of mining in economic growth and its fiscal implications. We find evidence to support a more favourable view of both the mining sector and the imperial state than that commonly presented in the literature. The interruption of colonial ‘mining‐led growth’ helps to explain the ‘lost decades’ for the economic development of Mexico after independence.

RESUMENEste trabajo consta de tres partes principales: en la primera se examina la hipótesis consistente en la existencia de una «definición débil» de «mining-led growth» en la economía novohispana del siglo XVIII y se defiende una versión «moderadamente optimista» de las conexiones entre expansión minera y crecimiento económico; en la segunda parte se analizan los determinantes de la producción de plata, entre los que figuran variables de política económica (precio del mercurio y consignaciones de las minas de Almadén), la cantidad de mercurio disponible en Nueva España y el precio del maíz, y se muestran algunos de los efectos positivos que tuvo la reconsideración del papel del Monopolio del mercurio en las finanzas de la Corona; en la tercera se presenta un ejercicio cuantitativo que pretende estimar el coste económico de la independencia de México, que resultaría ser elevado y atri-buible, en terminología de Coatsworth, no sólo a «lograr la independencia» sino a la «propia independencia».

No abstract