Spanish land reform, involving the break-up of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century. This paper uses new provincial data on landless workers, land prices and agrarian wages to consider if government intervention was needed because of...

This paper looks at the response of growers and merchants, first to vine disease and high prices, and then to the problems of overproduction and product adulteration. France produced a large range of wines, but by the early twentieth century most commodity chains were failing to provide accurate...

The US commodity export programme (CEP) provides subsidized credit to the importer (rather than subs1d1zed commodity prices) to alleviate foreign exchange and income problems on the part of the importer. In the case of Colombia, credit subs1d1es were such that the total cost of financed imports...

The traditional view that sharecropping was a cause of low productivity in European agriculture prior to the Second World War has been challenged by economic historians, and today the contact is often considered as efficient at reducing the monitoring costs associated with labour and allocation...

En torno a 1890, cambios de distinta naturaleza van a afectar la viticultura catalana cultivada en aparcería (rabassa morta): la codificación del contrato de rabassa, la difusión de la filoxera y un largo periodo de bajos precios del vino. Se ha tendido a considerar que los dos primeros...

La aparcería es una institución que, muy a menudo, se ha asociado a la miseria de los campesinos y al atraso o estancamiento agrario. Es un contrato en apariencia poco eficiente, 10 que no ha impedido su gran difusión e incluso su persistencia en la actualidad (al menos en gran parte de...

For long periods, and in line with recent theoretical literature, the rabassa morta sharecropping contract successfully reduced problems of moral hazard and opportunistic behavior, and provided incentives for sharecroppers to respond to market opportunities. However, from the late nineteenth...