Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Inequality, Living Standards And Growth: Two Centuries Of Economic Development In Mexico, Ingrid Bleynat, Amilcar Challú, Paul Segal
Inequality, Living Standards And Growth: Two Centuries Of Economic Development In Mexico, Ingrid Bleynat, Amilcar Challú, Paul Segal
History Faculty Publications
Historical wage and incomes data are informative both as normative measures of living standards, and as indicators of patterns of economic development. We show that, given limited historical data, median incomes are most appropriate for measuring welfare and inequality, while urban unskilled wages can be used to test dualist models of development. We present a new dataset including both series in Mexico from 1800 to 2015 and find that both have historically failed to keep up with aggregate growth: per worker GDP is now over eight times higher than in the nineteenth century, while unskilled urban real wages are only …
Agricultural Crisis And Biological Well-Being In Mexico, 1730-1835, Amilcar Challú
Agricultural Crisis And Biological Well-Being In Mexico, 1730-1835, Amilcar Challú
History Faculty Publications
The article examines how adverse climatic conditions and high food prices influenced the opportunities of peasants in pre-industrial Mexico between 1730 and 1835. Particular attention is paid to data of soldier heights, global climate events, warm-season tree growth, and real food prices to determine how these factors may have affected urban and rural populations. Declines were seen in the general standard of living and average height, while the cost of food increased. It is argued that distribution and acquisition of food has an equal influence on biological well-being as the availability of food at any specific given time.