Growth or stagnation? Well-being during the Spanish industrialization in Alcoy (1860-1910)

Abstract

This article examines the effects of industrialization on overall well-being in Alcoy, a classic industrial town during Spanish economic modernization, by developing a utility-based indicator of welfare that combines detailed information on wages, health and inequality during the period 1860-1910. We find that aggregate male welfare rose by 40 percentage points, and that most of this improvement took place before 1877. These gains were not equally distributed, since male workers in agriculture experienced long-term stagnation, while the well-being of industrial and service labourers rose substantially. We provide tentative calculations for female workers showing that their living standards did not stagnate during the last part of the 19th century. Furthermore, we quantify the implications of taking different age perspectives to measure well-being. We find that excluding the youngest part of the population from the calculations during the analyzed period underestimates welfare growth by more than 50 per cent.

The urban–rural height gap: evidence from late nineteenth-century Catalonia

“…The urban-rural height gap: evidence from late… the workforce and, in fact, between the birth cohorts of 1851-1855 and 1861-1865 urban conscripts became shorter than their rural counterparts (Moreno-Lázaro and Martínez-Carrión 2010). The same is found in the south-eastern industrial town of Alcoi, particularly for the cohorts born between the early 1860s and the late 1870s, and perhaps also in Antequera, a town in southern Spain, for the cohorts born in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (Puche and Cañabate-Cabezuelos 2016, for Alcoi;Martínez-Carrión and Cámara 2015, for Antequera; see also Martínez-Carrión et al 2014;Gallardo-Albarrán and García-Gómez 2022). Height data for the Mediterranean region of Valencia also show that rural conscripts were between 0.5 and 1.0 cm taller than their urban counterparts.…”