Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2004
Spain provides an opportunity to study the causes of regional differences in industrial development over the nineteenth century. As transportation costs decreased and barriers to domestic trade were eliminated, Spanish manufacturing became increasingly concentrated in a few regions. This article combines Heckscher-Ohlin and economic-geography frameworks and finds that comparative-advantage and increasing-return effects were economically very significant and practically explained all differences in industrialization levels across regions. The deficits of some regions in terms of industrialization appear to have been largely attributable to their factor endowments and the absence of home-market effects for modern industries.
Economic historians have long been concerned with why within countries there has been regional variation in industrial development and why certain regions and countries have industrialized earlier than others. A substantial part of the literature on this topic has suggested important links between variations in industrialization levels and the conditions of local agricultural production. Particularly, scholars have stressed the relationship between the regional differences in the supply of labor for manufacturing and disparities in the size of landholding, in the types of crops, in the productivity of females and children in relation to that of adult males, in the availability of landless workers, and in the seasonality of labor requirements in agriculture.1
See, among others, Goldin and Sokoloff, “Industrialization”; Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization”; Mokyr “Industrial Revolution”; and Sokoloff and Tchakerian “Manufacturing.”
See, for example, Easterlin, “Why Isn't the Whole World”; and Sandberg, “Case.”
Cipolla, Literacy, p. 69.
See, among others, Hoover, Location; Isard, Methods; and Pounds, Historical Geography.
Clark “Why Isn't the Whole World.”
A'Hearn, “Institutions,” p. 756.
Kim, “Expansion.”
Spain provides an opportunity to contrast the different explanations for regional divergences in industrial development during the early phases of industrialization.8
Note that regional histories of Spain and Italy have close parallels but today's regional differences in per capita income are less pronounced in Spain than in Italy (see, for example, on the Italian experience A'Hearn, “Institutions”; and Zamagni, Economic History).
The data are from the Spain's Population Censuses.
Major changes in the distribution of income across Spain's regions went hand in hand with the process of market integration and manufacturing concentration. They were primarily driven by both an income boom in the two most industrialized regions, Catalonia and the Basque Country, and an income slump in Andalucia and Extremadura. Catalonia exceeded average Spanish income per capita by 2 percent in 1800, by 24 percent in 1860, and by 87 percent in 1930. Even more remarkable was the evolution of the Basque Country. Starting off from relatively lower levels of income per capita, about 26 percent below national average, it reached a peak of about 46 percent above national average by 1930. In a sharp contrast, the income leadership of Andalucia in 1800 (43 percent above national average) vanished rapidly during the period. By 1930 its GDP per capita dropped to 77 percent of national average income per capita.10
Estimates of per capita regional GDP came from Alvarez Llano, “Estructura económica regional.”
Spanish historians are well aware of the importance of these regional differences in industrialization and income patterns. As a result, there has been considerable empirical work on this topic, although this consisted of region-based studies rather than overall interpretations of the process.11
A good example of this point of view are the collection of regional histories collected in Nadal and Carreras, Pautas; and Germán et al., Historia.
Ringrose, Spanish Miracle. See, on these advances and their regional distribution, Simpson, Spanish Agriculture.
A notable exception to this rule is Gómez Mendoza's (“De la harina”) explanation for the de-industrialization of Northern Castile. Thus, according to this economic historian, given the geographic and climatic conditions and the technology available in the nineteenth century, extensive dry farming was the most efficient type of cultivation in Castile. Under the influence of rapid integration within the new trade circuits created by the improvement in transportation and communications, the region's comparative advantage increasingly lay with cereals, especially wheat, abandoning manufacturing.
My contribution in this article is to provide a straightforward economic explanation for the differences in industrialization levels across Spanish provinces, and hence regions, in the nineteenth century. This new account explains not only the basic trends in manufacturing location but also is in harmony with other major characteristics of the nineteenth-century Spanish economy such as increasing divergence of income per capita across regions and economic integration characterized by greater mobility of commodities relative to that of factors. More specifically, following the seminal ideas of Paul Krugman and the recent works of Donald Davis and David Weinstein,14
See Davis and Weinstein “Market Access” and “Economic Geography”; and Davis, Weinstein, Bradford, and Shimpo “Factor Abundance Theory.” For theoretical justification of a model linking Heckscher-Ohlin and increasing returns frameworks see Krugman, “Increasing Returns,” pp. 1245–51.
Spanish historians agree that Spanish regions went from a set of relatively independent regional economies to an integrated national economy in the course of the nineteenth century but disagree on the exact timing and the causes of this process of market integration.15
Note that the regional interdependence of the local prices of commodities was not a nineteenth-century novelty as some market integration existed during the eighteenth century. See, for example, Hamilton, War; Reher, “Mercados”; and Ringrose, Spanish Miracle.
Sánchez-Albornoz, Precios agrícolas and Peña and Sánchez-Albornoz, Dependencia dinámica.
Gómez Mendoza, Ferrocarriles.
Barquín, “Precio”; Martínez Vara, “Mercado”; and Simpson, Spanish Agriculture, pp. 87–90. The technical superiority of Barquin's and Martínez Vara's calculations over Sánchez-Albornoz's is evident because they employ the most recent econometric models and techniques, which were not available by the late 1970s when Sánchez-Albornoz developed his studies. However, Barquin's studies suffer from a problem of sample bias given that he only includes data for one southern town. Consequently, it is certainly hard to choose which of these two interpretations of the process of market integration is more credible.
On these liberal reforms see Tedde de Lorca, “Cambio Institucional”; and Simpson, Spanish Agriculture, pp. 84–87. However, this liberalization of the home market was not accompanied by a simultaneous liberalization of foreign imports because the Spanish government used tariffs to cushion the impact of foreign competition over the nineteenth century.
On roads, see Madrazo, Sistema, pp. 163–79. On shipping, see Frax, Comercio de Cabotaje.
An examination of regional convergence in short-term interest rates of commercial paper suggests that the integration of capital markets seems to have been accomplished by the latter half of the nineteenth century. More specifically, commercial paper shows rapid convergence in prices across regions after 1850.21
Castañeda and Tafunell, “Las letras de cambio.”
O'Rourke and Williamson (Globalization, pp. 219–23) note that these were the main causes of the integration of international, and national, capital markets during the late nineteenth century.
Calvo, “Las telecomunicaciones.”
Castañeda and Tafunell, “Las letras de cambio.”
In spite of the difficulty of measuring them, one can be sure that migrations had little importance, except in Catalonia, in the first half of the nineteenth century.25
Pérez Moreda, “Demographic Modernization,” pp. 33–34.
For Spaniards in 1910, see Silvestre, “Las migraciones,” pp. 3–4. By 1910 emigrants were about 22.5 percent of the actual population of the New World (O'Rourke and Williamson, Globalization, table 8.1).
However, analyses of the pattern and extent of migration flows shed little light on the issue of integration. Markets could be perfectly integrated but exhibit scant movements of labor or they could exhibit high rates of movements but be in fact poorly integrated. The explanation of such a paradox is straightforward. When two labor markets are integrated real wage differentials are so small that they do not cover the costs of moving from one region to another. Instead, two poorly integrated labor markets exhibit such huge wage differentials that possible wage gains covered moving costs. Consequently, a more efficient measure of integration is wage differentials. Price gaps and price dispersion should decline whereas price correlation between markets should increase as market integration progresses in factor markets in the same way as we observe in commodity markets. Applying this principle, a simple and widely used measure of market integration is the unweighted coefficient of variation of wages across regions.27
The unweighted coefficient of variation in a particular year is the standard deviation of wages divided by the mean.
These coefficients of variation of agrarian wages show a significant downward trend exhibiting the typical behavior of convergence processes resulting from market integration. Similar trends are also observed for unskilled urban and industrial workers' wages from 1850 to 1914. We also observe a declining wage gap between urban and rural wages between 1860 and 1914 and find that Spanish wage gaps were smaller than urban-rural wage gaps of other countries such as France, the United States, and Britain.28
Rosés and Sánchez-Alonso, “Regional Wage Convergence,” table 5.
Note that this conclusion represents a departure from the previous literature. The few historians who have previously examined the Spanish labor market before 1914 were generally struck by its apparent poor performance. These studies leave the strong notion that, even if there was some migration, opportunities for arbitrage were not fully exploited (see, for example, Mikelarena “Los movimientos migratorios”; and Simpson “Real Wages”).
Thus we find that in the prerailway age, the signs of the emergence of a national transportation system were clearly visible as roads and coastal shipping connected regions. Even so, evidence also seems to indicate that transportation costs declined sharply during the first half of the nineteenth century but there is still doubt as to whether the integration of commodity markets was completed before or after railways. Moreover, data show factor markets integrating later than commodity markets during the second half of the century. According to this, one may confidentially assume that the movements of capital and labor across Spanish regions and provinces were by far less important than the movements of goods.
This section examines changes in manufacturing location and concentration simultaneous to the progressive integration of Spanish commodities and factor markets during the nineteenth century. First, it shows that manufacturing location varied across regions during this period. Second, it documents how divergent location trends are mainly caused by changes in the location of modern industries. Third, it also establishes that traditional and modern industries had different concentration levels.
The regional distribution of manufacturing employment varied considerably from the end of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. As shown in Table 2, Catalonia and the Basque Country doubled their participation in overall figures. Particularly, the share of Catalonia in manufacturing employment increased from 12 percent in 1797 to about 17 percent in 1860 and over 25 percent in 1910. By contrast, other regions such as Northern Castile and Aragón lost ground remarkably, halving their shares. Andalusia, the most populated region, lost its industrial leadership but retained an important share (about one-fifth) of national manufacturing employment. Finally, other regions such as the Mediterranean, the Northwest, and Southern Castile maintained, with small changes, their relative participation in overall figures.
In accordance with the manufacturing location trends observed in Table 2, the nineteenth century can be divided into two periods: the first half (up to 1860) and the second half (from 1860 to 1910). During the first half of the century, only Catalonia and the Northwest region significantly increased their shares and Aragón and Northern Castile fell behind appreciably. In the second half, Catalonia continued with its expansion but the Basque Country witnessed a rapid increase in its figures. At the same time, the industrial progress of the Northwest regressed and the de-industrialization of Northern Castile intensified. Finally, Andalucia, Aragón, and Southern Castile lost ground slightly whereas the Mediterranean region maintained its share in national totals.
A satisfactory description of changes in manufacturing location must include consideration of the different evolution of traditional and modern industries.30
Chemicals, textiles, metallurgy, and engineering compose the modern industry whereas the rest of manufacturing forms the traditional sector. Although it would be desirable to also include other small industries, such as paper and flour mills, in the modern category, there are no data on regional employment in these industries.
Table 3 reveals that employment growth rates varied widely across regions and traditional and modern industries. In all regions, employment in traditional industries grew from 1797 to 1910 whereas, in sharp contrast, the employment in the modern ones only increased in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and the Northwest. Likewise, the largest deviations from the Spanish average were in the modern industries with extraordinary differences between the two most industrialized regions (Catalonia and the Basque Country) and the rest. Therefore, the evolution of the traditional industries does not contribute much to our understanding of the differences in manufacturing employment growth rates whereas the contrary holds for the dynamics of modern industries. That is, the changes in the regional distribution of the manufacturing employment can be mainly attributed to changes in the sphere of modern industries.
It seems plausible to suppose that there was also a modification of the level of geographic concentration associated to this dramatic change in the location of industries. A simple and common way of finding changes in geographic concentration of industries is to estimate Hoover's coefficients of localization.31
To compute Hoover's coefficient first estimate the following location quotient (LOij)

where Lij is employment in industry i, for province j, Lj is the total industrial employment for province j, and LiSp is employment in industry i, and LSpis total employment in Spain. Then place the provinces in decreasing order by their location quotients, and compute the cumulative percentage of employment in industry i over the provinces (y-axis). Finally, compute the cumulative percentage of employment in total manufacturing over the regions (x-axis).
The Spanish data are less detailed than today's two-digit SIC data. Nowadays, 20 categories comprise manufacturing standard two-digit SIC data whereas Spanish data only furnish information up to nine categories. Obviously, this data limitation reduces the amount of observed manufacturing concentration. Ellison and Glaeser (“Dartboard Approach,” table 5) showed that raw geographic concentration of industry doubled as one moves to finer industry definitions (for example from two-digit to three-digit SIC definition; that is, doubling the number of categories). Consequently, one can confidentially predict that the “real” Hoover's coefficient at two-digit SIC is about one-and-a-half times or twice as big as the observed.
The unweighted and weighted averages of Hoover's coefficient indicate that manufacturing became slightly more concentrated during the nineteenth century (see Table 4). An important element in this trend was a pair of industries (apparel and food) that became relatively more regionally dispersed and important in terms of employment over time. Therefore, the aggregate coefficient hides the notable tendency towards the concentration of several industries. Specifically, textile, metal, miscellaneous, and leather industries became more regionally localized throughout the entire period. Instead, other industries, such as chemicals, stone, clay and glass, and wood and furniture, exhibited little change in location during this period. Note that the two leading sectors of industrialization (metal and textiles) were among those industries increasing their concentration levels. In the case of textiles, concentration appears to have been especially strong between 1797 and 1860 during the early phases of the transition from cottage to factory production, and the early phases of market integration.
As a large literature has emphasized, regional specialization may arise as regions make use of their comparative advantage, benefit from increasing returns in production, or both. We can illustrate this by assuming that, under autarky, each region produces all the goods that it consumes, the location of industries is stable and the level of industrial concentration is low. When trade costs decrease and product markets tend to integrate, the HO model predicts that regional specialization will arise as regions produce and export products that are relatively intensive in their abundant resource.33
See Flam and Flanders, Heckscher-Ohlin, for a presentation of the theory. See also O'Rourke and Williamson, Globalization, for an application of the HO framework to history.
It should also be noted that the HO model predicts convergence in per capita income across regions that, unfortunately, does not conform to Spanish history during the nineteenth century. This result is motivated by the factor-price-equalization (FPE) theorem, a core result of the HO model. This theorem states that in equilibrium, given a variety of restrictive assumptions, factor prices will be equal across regions. Clearly such perfect outcomes are not observed in the real world but trade economists generally accept a looser version of this theorem, arguing that commodity-price convergence induces factor-price and real-income convergence. See, for example, Leamer “Heckscher-Ohlin Model.”
Flam and Flanders, Heckscher-Ohlin, p. 90.
The new economic geography has introduced an increasing-returns (IRS) model that concludes that industrial concentration arises to take advantage of scale and variety gains from specialization.36
See, for example, Krugman, “Scale Economies,” Geography, and “Increasing Returns”; Krugman and Venables, “Globalization”; and Fujita, Krugman, and Venables, Spatial Economy. Moreover, the IRS model appears to reconcile with Spanish history during the nineteenth century because it predicts manufacturing concentration and income divergence with market openness.
Instead, in a situation with zero transportation costs and identical and homothetical tastes, and hence decreasing returns, strong domestic demand for a good will tend to make it an import rather than an export (Krugman, “Scale Economies,” p. 955).
Inversely, if transportation costs are high or if the markets of both regions are the same size, full concentration of the increasing-returns industry in the larger region will no longer take place. See Helpman and Krugman, Foreign Trade, for a powerful development of this theory and, also, Davis “Home Market,” for a severe criticism on its assumptions.
This is the so-called Linder hypothesis (see Linder, Trade).
Krugman and Venables, “Globalization.”
There is a large literature on this issue. See, among others, Marshall, Principles; Pred, Spatial Dynamics; and Henderson, Urban Development.
Roughly, a simple version of IRS model operates as follows. When transportation costs are high, there is little interregional trade and regional specialization. In other words, manufacturing establishments are not concentrated as all regions consume and produce all variety of goods. Local wages depend mainly on the size of the regional workforce and will decrease when the number of workers in the region increases. When transportation costs decrease, interregional trade increases.42
Note that in HO and IRS models the force driving regional specialization is a reduction in trade costs (see, for example, Krugman and Venables, “Globalization”), whereas the integration of markets is not a necessary condition for increasing regional specialization.
Nevertheless, if economic integration is characterized by greater mobility of labor and capital relative to that of commodities, then the outcomes of the IRS model vary substantially (see, for example, Krugman and Venables, “Globalization”; and Fujita, Krugman and Venables, Spatial Economy). Thus, with decreasing transportation costs and growing migration rates, the model predicts three different outcomes. An initial period of wage and income per capita convergence with population moving to the region offering higher wages. In the following stage, there will be a new equilibrium with equal wages across regions and with workers evenly divided. The model also predicts a third period characterized by increasing wage (and income) divergence with workers concentrated in the regions offering the higher wages.
Recently, Donald Davis and David Weinstein have explored the power of HO and IRS models to account for the location of manufacturing production in a series of papers.
44See Davis and Weinstein “Market Access” and “Economic Geography”; and Davis, Weinstein, Bradford and Shimpo “Factor Abundance Theory.”
Davis and Weinstein (“Market Access,” pp. 14–15) give the following definition of goods and industries: “Under the hypothesis of increasing returns, a good is a collection of a large number of varieties produced under monopolistic competition … By contrast, under the hypothesis of comparative advantage, a good is a traditional homogeneous commodity. Industries, in both frameworks, consist of a collection of goods produced using a common technology.”
See Davis and Weinstein (“Economic Geography”) for a more detailed discussion of the mathematics.

where Ωgn Vpis the endowments effect and Idiosyncratic Demand is the economic-geography effect. More specifically, Ωgn is the inverse of the technology matrix mapping output into factors, Vp is the vector of endowments of province p, and the idiosyncratic demand is computed as
where D denotes absorption in province P or the rest of Spain, RSP.
47It should be noted that this equation simplifies the geography implicit in Krugman (“Scale Economies”) and, hence, does not consider demand in adjacent regions.
Before proceeding with the direct estimation of the main model (equation 1), it appears useful to investigate the impact of HO framework on the localization of the production across Spanish provinces. So I compute several regressions using production as the dependent variable and endowments as independent variables. In other words, I estimate the following linear relationship
48See Davis and Weinstein (“Economic Geography”) for the assumptions of this estimation.

where the output, X, of industry n in region (province) p is a linear function of the Σn, the inverse of the technology matrix mapping output into factors, and Vp, the vector of endowments of province p.
The econometric analysis is performed with 1861 manufacturing output data and 1859–1860 data for all right-side variables (endowments) in order to avoid simultaneity problems.49
This is the “classical” procedure in the literature.
Moreover, it is likely that the estimation of the HO model in alternative years at the beginning or at the end of the nineteenth century might offer less conclusive results. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, market integration forces had just recently become active and at the end of the nineteenth century large movements of production factors took place across Spanish provinces.
The data used for the analysis include manufacturing output, endowments, and technology for 43 of 49 provinces in Spain.51
This article takes provinces in Spain as the geographic unit of analysis. Spanish provinces are mid-sized because they are bigger than French departments or British counties, but smaller than U.S. states. It should be noted that the definition of Spanish provinces in 1833 was not based on geographic criteria but rather the Spanish government created provinces following pre-existing historical divisions and the areas of influence of major towns. For that reason, Spanish provinces adjust quite well to the functional integration principle that defines regions by the presence of a nucleus and the corresponding area of influence. If one wants to estimate an IRS model, the unit-of-analysis should be defined in such a way. Instead, these kinds of analysis units pose problems in quantifying the HO framework, where factors should be mobile within regions but less so across regions (see, Kim, “Expansion,” p. 884, for a discussion of the question).
In empirical literature, some authors employed education-based classifications of labor whereas others preferred occupational-based classifications (see, for example, Trefler, “Missing Trade”) but occupational-based classifications are likely to be less exogenous with respect to output shares than are occupational classifications. However, in this case, occupational-based classifications are probably preferable to the educational-based classification for two reasons. The first is that the 1860 census did not record education levels, but literacy. Second, as a large literature has pointed out, literacy is a very poor proxy for skills in the mid-nineteenth century.
There are, however, two major drawbacks that need to be addressed before proceeding further. According to the literature, differences in technology across industries should be taken into account and endowments do not matter at the finer levels of aggregation. Consequently, the HO framework is estimated for the whole manufacturing sector and separately for three different subaggregates, which pooled several manufacturing sectors (Table 5, panel A). To combine different sectors, the aggregation criteria is the capital-labor ratio.53
The source for capital-labor intensity ratios is Gimenez Guited, Guia fabril.
The (weaving and finishing) textile industry had significantly smaller capital-labor ratios than did cotton, wool, and silk spinning because it was less mechanized. Consequently, I decided to separate textiles into several industries.
It is also not realistic to assume that the HO determinants of manufacturing location (that is, endowments) were completely exogenous to manufacturing production. Regions with more manufacturing attracted unskilled workers because labor demand was growing and wages were higher during their early industrialization. Similarly, the agrarian workforce decreased in these regions because employment opportunities in the manufacturing sector were rising. A solution to this problem requires the identification of exogenous instruments. Any direct measure of endowments is eligible as an instrument if it is not driven by the development of manufacturing. For this reason, obvious candidates as instruments are endowments before early industrialization.55
Spanish historiography agrees that early industrialization in Spain started on the 1830s.
Table 5, panel A reports the results of the main specification, regressing 1861 manufacturing output on 1859–1860 endowments. They are both significant and plausible. The adjusted R2 and F-statistic are relatively high in manufacturing and aggregates 1 and 2, but not in aggregate 3. This suggests that even after controlling for size-based variation; endowments explain almost the 85 percent of the variance of aggregate manufacturing output. They also explain about the 60 percent in the highest capital-labor ratio industries, which formed aggregate 1, and about 90 percent in the case of the high consumption sectors, which formed aggregate 2. Instead, the HO framework yields little information on the localization of the traditional industries with the lowest capital-labor ratio, which formed aggregate 3. However, these industries are quite reasonable candidates for an explanation based on natural advantage rather than comparative advantage. For example, the olive oil refining industry was surely affected by the suitability of the provinces' climates for growing olives. The sign and coefficients of the different variables also lie within what one can expect. Provinces well endowed with capital, artisans, and unskilled labor had a comparative advantage in manufacturing, whereas the contrary holds for provinces well endowed in land, agrarian labor, and professions.
In panel B of Table 5, I regress 1861 manufacturing output on 1797 endowments.56
Caution is required in interpreting the result presented in panel B. It should be noted that the regressions suffer from few degrees-of-freedom (the reasons for this is discussed in the notes to Table 4) and, hence, the adjusted R2 and F-statistic are large by construction. Furthermore, estimates of endowments in 1797 are likely to be error ridden. Nevertheless, the major effect of measurement error would be to create an attenuation bias toward zero. Therefore, one might presume that the coefficients obtained are, if anything, underestimates.
Note that the coefficient of capital is only significant in aggregate 3.
Given the long span of time (60 years) considered here, this reallocation would be produced not only by reallocations of labor across sectors and provinces but also by differences in life expectancy and birth rates across provinces. In this sense, it is well known that in industrializing regions birth rates were higher (due to earlier marriages) and mortality rates were also higher (due to poor hygienic conditions in industrial districts and working conditions).
For seven of eight macro-regions (the Basque Country is excluded due to data incompleteness), Table 6 reports the impact of factor endowments on industrialization levels, employing the main specification. To assist interpretation, the last two columns of the table indicate, respectively, the predicted and the observed industrialization levels and panel B the deviations from the Spanish norm. Regions such as the Mediterranean and Andalusia have industrialization levels quite similar to that of Spain as a whole, and for them the exercise furnishes little information. The regions with industrialization levels far above or below the national are of course of most interest.
What is remarkable in this simulation is the fact that a large part of variation in regional industrialization levels still remains unexplained after taking into account endowments. As the last two columns of Table 6 show, differences between predicted and observed values at regional level are large and significant. To give an example, endowments predict a 37 percent higher level of industrialization in Aragón than the observed level. Consequently, the estimates of the HO model do not necessarily reject an interpretation of the differences in regional industrialization levels based on economic geography forces.
Despite these major reservations, the exercise in Table 6 can also be employed to suggest endowment-based interpretations of the divergent evolution of industrialization in Spanish regions. It reveals that Andalusia was relatively poorly endowed in unskilled and artisan labor. Catalonia had a relatively high industrialization level due to the relatively scarcity of land, professions, and agrarian labor and the relative abundance of artisans and capital. Instead, unskilled labor was a minor player in explaining the Catalan exceptionality. In a sharp contrast with Catalonia, the lower industrialization levels of Northern Castile are largely explained by the abundance of land, agrarian labor, and professions. In the case of Southern Castile, capital also played a role in lowering industrialization levels. In the Mediterranean region, unskilled labor was too scarce and agrarian labor and professions too abundant. Finally, the evolution of the Northwest can be explained by appealing to its capital scarcity and abundance of agrarian labor.
There were significant economic-geography effects in Spanish manufacturing by 1861. To compute these effects I estimated equation 1 following Davis and Weinstein's methodology. This equation can be estimated at various levels of aggregation, as linear specification or as a system of seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR).
Table 7 reports estimates of full equation 1 at higher levels of aggregation. What is striking in these estimates is the fact that the regressions fits are quite high. Indeed, it shows that at the end of the early phase of Spanish industrialization, factor endowments with economic geography specifications explained about the 90 percent of the variation in these aggregates. The results also bolster our confidence in the economic-geography effects. Idiosyncratic demand is significantly larger than one in three of the four aggregates computed, whereas it is close to zero only in one (aggregate 3), which corresponds to traditional industries where natural advantages were very important.
One could run an additional robustness check to confirm that the regression is identifying economic-geography effects. The results are obviously very sensitive to the aggregation scheme. For example, combining industries with constant returns with industries with increasing returns might dilute the real effects. One simple solution to that problem is to compute equation 1 in full for each industry individually. Table 8 shows the results for that exercise.
The economic-geography effects are significantly larger than unity for five of 12 sectors: cotton spinning, flour mills, the metals industry, textiles, and wool spinning. Furthermore, the results are robust to whichever method of estimation one chooses.59
The β-coefficients of Idiosyncratic Demand (not reported in the table) for these five industries also show very statistically significant economic-geography effects. They are typically over the 0.8 range (3.45 for flour mills, 0.91 for cotton spinning, 0.84 for the metals industry, 0.81 for textiles, and 0.81 in wool spinning). A one-standard-deviation movement in idiosyncratic demand on average moves production by more than 0.8 standard deviation. In other words, observed fluctuations in idiosyncratic demand provide a lot of information on production patterns.
Krugman, Geography.
Davis and Weinstein, “Market Access” and “Economic Geography.”
The 12 sectors in Table 8 corresponded to about the 82 percent of value added in industry by 1861.62
Using the value-added shares computed by Prados de la Escosura, De Imperio, pp. 143–67.
This article offers new insights concerning the causes of the industrialization of Spain's regions by applying recent development in international economics. The fortunes of a region are assumed to depend not only upon its own endowments but also on market-size effects. By contrast, many economic historians take a different approach assuming that the fortunes of each region has their own specific explanation. From the previous pages, a common pattern emerges: regions industrialized or failed to do so according to a combination of comparative advantage (HO model) and IRS forces.
It seems necessary to emphasize that endowments are not enough to explain the full history. Why did modern manufacturing concentrate in some regions while others, in spite of their comparative advantage in manufacturing, have few modern factories? The explanation lies in the fact that modern industries that produced heterogeneous goods exercised monopolistic competition and experienced increasing returns. Consequently, they tended to be concentrated in regions in which the home-market effects were larger.
What really caused these home-market effects? It is premature to attempt to answer this here, but a few hypotheses might be ventured. Home-market effects can arise from simple market-size scale economies or the much more sophisticated Marshallian externalities (backward and forward linkages). Many manufacturing sectors with increasing returns are also sectors with backward and forward linkages. Consequently, it is much more plausible that Marshallian externalities were more important for producing home- market effects than pure market-size effects. In any case, these are simple observations that require much greater analysis and empirical study.
These findings suggest the appeal of some sort of evolutionary interpretation of the changes in the location of the Spanish manufacturing during the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, due to high transportation and transaction costs, there was little interregional trade and regional specialization was scarce. In the first half of the nineteenth century, transportation and transaction costs decreased. Trade among regions increased and regional goods markets became steadily more integrated. At this point, manufacturing location varied. These changes in the location of manufacturing production arose both from comparative advantage and from additional external economies. Increasing returns were highly relevant in the new modern manufacturing industries, which produced heterogeneous goods, but negligible in traditional industries. Some regions with a large comparative advantage in manufacturing because they were well endowed in artisans and capital, such as Catalonia, also benefited from gains from external economies. The production structures of Agrarian (poor) regions did not converge with those of industrialized regions for two reasons. First, increasing-returns industries did not move into poor regions. Second, agrarian labor did not migrate massively to the new rich regions up to the first third of the twentieth century.
Finally, I would like to underline three broad suggestions for further research. First, the article's findings suggest the need for rethinking the relationship between agricultural revolution and regional industrialization. I believe that the conventional view of successful industrialization as exclusively determined by the success of a previous agricultural revolution is too simple. With the results obtained here, it seems much more productive to study the relationship between agricultural changes and regional differences in factor endowments. Second, it also appears necessary to study the forces shaping the regional distribution of endowments and particularly the influence of pre-industrial institutions on that distribution. Third, from the point of view of economic theory, this article has supplemented the explanatory power of the new economic geography in economic history. In particular, the hypothesis of the importance of home-market effects in determining the localization of production is fully confirmed by this research.
This Appendix describes chronologically the process of construction and the sources of the different variables used in the calculations.
Provincial-level data on sectoral output of 16 manufacturing sectors in 1861 were taken from Gimenez Guited's book.63
Gimenez Guited, Guía Fabril.
See, Ciccone and Hall (“Productivity,” p. 60) for a detailed discussion of the advantages of that output concept in regional studies.
1859–1860 data have been used to compute endowments and other right-hand-side variables. The numbers of different categories of labor by provinces were taken directly from the Population Census of 1860 and then added to get labor-category totals: professions (clerks, public servants, professionals, and commerce), artisans, unskilled (day workers, construction workers, transportation workers, miners, poor, servants, and factory workers), and agrarian labor.
Two different methods can be employed to compute capital endowments by province. First, the data on housing prices, as a proxy for capital prices, from the property provincial bureaus can be used directly (capital 1).65
The data include the prices and quantities of houses sold during the year, the prices and quantities of houses transferred by inheritance, and the prices and quantities of houses that were settled in mortgage. Specifically, in the calculations, an average of these three prices during two years (1863–1864) has been employed. Finally, average prices per house were transformed in prices by m2with data on the average size of houses by province from 1874 statistics. All data were taken directly from Ministerio de Gracia y Justicia, Estadísticas.
Anuario estadístico de España.
This estimation is derived from the following identity the StockK=(RentK)/(I+δ) where I is the interest rate and δ is the depreciation rate.
The provincial deflators for housing and livestock were taken from Rosés and Sánchez-Alonso, “Wage Convergence.”
The next problem was how to estimate land endowments by provinces. Several alternatives were available. First, average land prices can be directly employed (land 1).69
I use the same source and methodology as in the case of housing prices.
Banco Urquijo, La riqueza, vol 2, p. 378.
Anuario estadístico de España.
Pro Ruíz, “Ocultación,” p. 93.
A proxy for the provincial Gross Domestic Product in the private sector was estimated for all provinces in the sample. This variable was exclusively used to weight the regressions in order to correct for heteroskedasticity. The provincial GDP was computed by adding up land, housing and other capital rents, depreciation, and wages (including the remuneration of the self-employed). Complete provincial data on unskilled wages was combined with data on the size of the workforce and skill premiums by categories of workers to get employee remuneration.73
The data for unskilled wages came from Rosés and Sánchez-Alonso, “Wage Convergence”; and the data on skills premium came from U.S. Congress, Labor, pp. 1345–441.
Anuario estadístico de España.
Data on Spanish GDP are from Prados de la Escosura, El progreso.
The deflator came from Rosés and Sánchez-Alonso, “Wage Convergence.”
1797 data have been used to compute endowments in instrumental regressions (Table 5, panel B). The numbers of different categories of labor were introduced by provinces directly from the Population Census of 1797 and then added to get labor-category totals. Given the absence of estimates on capital, urbanization rates (cities with more than 5,000 habitants) were used as a proxy. Finally, as a proxy for land values, agrarian production from the Censo de la Riqueza Territorial e Industrial was used.
The construction of the consumption data by province was quite complex. In broad terms, three types of consumption goods were used in this study: intermediate (cotton yarn, wool yarn, silk yarn, and metal goods), taxed goods (olive oil, liquors, cork, paper, and soap), and duty-free goods (flour, leather, and textiles). The consumption of intermediate goods for each province was computed using Gimenez Guited's data.77
Gimenez Guited, Guia Fabril.
Anuario estadístico de España.
Rosés and Sánchez-Alonso, “Wage Convergence,” furnishes that data on provincial household consumption.
Data on Spanish consumption are from Prados de la Escosura, El progreso.
I have benefited from the comments of Stefano Battilossi, Klaus Demset, Stefan Houpt, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Teresa Sanchís, James Simpson, seminar participants at Universidad Carlos III, Universidad Complutense, Fourth World Cliometrics Conference held in Montreal, two anonymous referees, and the editors of this Journal. I gratefully acknowledge the generous permission of Professor Juan Carmona to allow me to draw on our unpublished joint work on Spanish land and housing prices for this article. The Spanish Ministry of Education (Grant SEC 2002-01595) supports this research. The usual disclaimer applies.
AGRARIAN NOMINAL AND REAL WAGE DISPERSION, 1833–1914 (unweighted coefficient of variation of wages)
ESTIMATES OF HECKSCHER-OHLIN DETERMINANTS OF PRODUCTION
THE REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF MANUFACTURING EMPLOYMENT (percentage relative to Spanish totals)
THE CHANGING REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF MODERN AND TRADITIONAL MANUFACTURING EMPLOYMENT, 1797–1910
HOOVER'S COEFFICIENT OF LOCALIZATION IN MANUFACTURING, 1797–1910
IMPACT ON INDUSTRIALIZATION LEVELS OF FACTOR ENDOWMENTS
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY EFFECTS ON PRODUCTION: AGGREGATES
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY EFFECTS ON PRODUCTION: INDIVIDUAL INDUSTRIES