Economic reforms and growth in Franco's Spain^,

Abstract

This paper is an attempt at assessing the economic impact of market-oriented reforms undertaken during General Franco's dictatorship, in particular, the 1959 Stabilization and Liberalization Plan. Using an index of macroeconomic distortions (IMD) the relationship between economic policies and the growth record is examined. Although a gradual reduction in macroeconomic distortions was already in motion during the 1950s, the 1959 Plan opened the way to a new institutional design that favoured a free-market allocation of resources and allowed

GDP and life expectancy in Italy and Spain over the long run: A time-series approach

“…These are big countries, 5 For Italy, see Fenoaltea (2003Fenoaltea ( , 2005 and, more recently, Vecchi (2015a, 2015b). For Spain, see, among others, Pons and Tirado (2006), Prados de la Escosura and Rosés (2009), Prados de la Escosura (2010a), Sabaté, Fillat, and Gracia (2011) and Prados de la Escosura, Rosés, and Sanz-Villarroya (2012). For other countries, see, for instance, the remarkable study on Turkey by Altug, Filiztekin, and Pamuk (2008), or the recent reconstruction of Venezuelan GDP, 1830, by De Corso (2013.…”

Tax revenues and the fiscal cost of trade liberalization, 1792–2006

“…at the start of the 20th century), in part because quantitative restrictions on foreign trade were replaced by tariffs (see Prados de la Escosura et al, 2012;Lampe and Sharp, 2013 ). 20 The average episode during this period, described in the last column of Table 3 , looks extremely similar to the average episode in the contemporary (post 1970) period, described in column six of Table 2 .…”

Economic History Matters

“…Did the disappointing outcomes of reforms come from fundamental conceptual flaws, or failures in implementation, or because the program was incomplete (Birdsall et al, 2010)? Given that reforms with a similar philosophy have been successful in other contexts such as Franco's Spain (Prados de la Escosura et al, 2011) and that trade liberalization that reduced capital goods prices in the late twentieth century raised growth (Estevadeordal and Taylor, 2008), there is something of a puzzle to be solved and the 'local knowledge' of economic historians can be a key ingredient in answering these questions.…”