Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLIX:1 (Estate, 2018), 1–8.

Jordi Martí-Henneberg and Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat

introduzione: A New Look at the Origins of
Economic Growth and Regional Inequality The
articles that comprise this special issue pursue two complementary
objectives. On the one hand, they seek to determine the extent to
which adopting a regional approach is relevant for explaining the
process of long-term economic growth and, on the other, to mea-
sure how sustained economic growth has caused territorial imbal-
ances in income. To do so, they study the origins of growth in a
range of different countries analyzing development and its impact
on a regional scale. Studies of economic history show that during
the earliest stages of economic development, the processes involved
tend to have a markedly local or regional component and that the
start of economic growth is connected to the emergence of major
inequalities in the territorial distribution of economic activity and/
or population. Under these circumstances, a historical analysis of
the reasons behind the relative success or failure of different regions
within different national and/or supranational contexts could greatly
improve our understanding of the origins of economic growth.1

Jordi Martí-Henneberg, the organizer of this special issue, is Professor of Human Geography,
University of Lleida. He also organized the special issue Railways, Population, and Geographical
Information Systems, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLII (2011), 1–157, to which he contributed
“Geographical Information Systems and the Study of History,” 1–13; with Laija Mojica, “Rail-
ways and Population Distribution: France, Spain, and Portugal,” 15–28; with Kaloyan Stanev and
Martin Ivanov, “Regional Transformations of a State under Construction,” 111–134.

Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat is Professor of Economic Analysis, University of Valencia. He is
the author of, with Julio Martinez-Galarraga and Joan R. Rosés, “The Long-Term Patterns of
Regional Income Inequality in Spain, 1860–2000,” Regional Studies, XLIX (2015), 502–517; con
Jordi Pons, Elisenda Paluzie, and Julio Martinez-Galarraga, “Trade Policy and Wage Gradients:
Evidence from a Protectionist Turn,” Cliometrica, VII (2013), 295–318.

The authors are grateful to the following institutions for their ﬁnancial support of the
research in this special issue of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History: (1) European Union (EU—
Jean Monnet Action); (2) ICREA—Generalitat de Catalunya; (3) MINECO CSO2015-65733-P,
CO2015-65049-C2-1-P, ECO2015-71534-REDT; E (4) Fundación BBVA.

© 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_e_01229

Sidney Pollard, The Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 (Nuovo
1
York, 1981); Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Regional Inequality and the Process of National Devel-
opment: A Description of the Patterns,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, XIII (1965),
3–84.

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2 | M A R T Í – H E NN E B E R G A ND T IR A D O – F A B RE G A T

The subject of spatial inequality has received considerable atten-
tion from policymakers and other analysts; conﬂicting arguments
about disparities in regional income frequently appear in the head-
lines of press articles and in mainstream media debates. Not surpris-
ingly, Perciò, this issue forms the backbone of the Europe 2020
strategy. The Cohesion Policy of the European Union (EU) speciﬁ-
cally aims to reduce the disparities that currently exist between dif-
ferent EU regions and to promote a more balanced and sustainable
pattern of territorial development. A tal fine, the EU allocated
EUR 352 billion for Cohesion Policy measures for the period from
2014 to 2020—an amount equivalent to almost one-third of the total
EU budget.

Scholars working in regional economics and human geography
have given considerable attention to inequalities with an eye toward
informing public policy. Tuttavia, they have often assumed regional
imbalances to have been geographically determined or to have
emerged in the recent past, without considering their historical
roots. In this respect, the research included in this special issue sup-
ports the hypothesis that current regional disparities are mainly the
product of long and complex processes that involve a combination
of historical, geographical, economic, and political factors. Di conseguenza,
it focuses on the structural causes of observed inequalities, the con-
texts in which they arose, and the likelihood that they can be cor-
rected or delimited through the application of territorial cohesion
policies.

The contributions to this collection apply the methodology
proposed by Geary and Stark (2002) to compile a new data set
of historical estimates of regional GDP. In accord with this method-
ology, they calculate regional shares of GDP based on the working
population and nominal wages, using them as a proxy for produc-
tivity by region and sector. They employ the results to answer the
two questions posed above for a group of European and South
American countries. This selection of countries presents not only
a diversity of case studies from two continents but also a common
culture that permits a reasoned comparison.2

Taken together, the contributions demonstrate how the observed
economic growth corresponds to two relatively distinct dynamics. In

2 Tom Stark and Frank Geary, “Examining Ireland’s Post-Famine Economic Growth
Performance,” Economic Journal, CXII (2002), 919–935.

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E C O N O M I C G R O WT H A N D R E G I O N A L I N E Q U A L I T Y

| 3

the cases of Great Britain, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France,
the origins of contemporary economic growth can be traced to the
industrialization of a small group of regions. These regions were
characterized by their plentiful possession of accumulating factors
(such as human capital and infrastructure) and a location that allowed
them to exploit the advantages (such as transportation costs) offered
by economies of agglomeration associated with their industrial
production. Di conseguenza, economic growth also meant growth in ter-
ritorial inequality throughout the ﬁrst phase of their development.
In contrasto, national economic development in Argentina,
Chile, and Uruguay started in regions that were well-endowed
with natural resources (land and/or minerals). Because the spatial
distribution of the natural resources in these countries was not
subject to economies of agglomeration, spatial concentration and
economic growth did not lead to an increase in regional inequal-
ità. Infatti, the opening of new markets offered opportunities for
growth in relatively poor regions, facilitating an incipient form of
regional convergence—that is, a trend toward greater equality.

THE CONTEXT OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS Regional-income inequal-
ità, a persistent feature of the global economic landscape, is a cru-
cial issue for policymakers. Nevertheless, and as the contributions
to this special issue indicate, the current imbalances are essentially
the result of a long-term evolution traceable to the origins of mod-
ern economic growth. The customary paradigm for economic
growth is the industrialization that originated in Britain during
the eighteenth century. In this context, newly emerging technol-
ogies led to sustained growth in the productivity of the workforce
E, eventually, to a substantial improvement in living standards.
Even so, industrialization and economic growth did not occur
everywhere, or at the same time.

The territorial imbalance that developed under these circum-
stances inﬂuenced the geographical spread of economic activity
and hence the distribution of national income. Referring to this
phenomenon, Williamson imagined the timeline of a country’s
regional economic balance as an inverted U-shaped pattern. In-
equality increased most in the early stages—mainly during the
nineteenth century in much of Europe—before regions began to
hold steady and eventually converge toward greater equality. Lui
claimed that this path, from the origins of economic growth to the

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4 | M A R T Í – H E NN E B E R G A ND T IR A D O – F A B RE G A T

present, should always be clearly distinguishable. Tuttavia, several
empirical works have shown a recent upsurge in territorial inequal-
ità, converting the U-shaped relationship between development
and regional inequality into more of an N-shaped relationship.

Notwithstanding this graphic temporal analysis, few empirical
studies of the evolution in regional growth and inequality have
adopted a historical perspective. Infatti, because most of them
focus on recent decades due to limitations intrinsic to the available
dati, they cannot provide information about the evolution of ter-
ritorial inequalities, or aid in the discovery of what determined it.
This special issue makes a valuable contribution to the literature
about the causes of regional economic growth by constructing
and analyzing a new set of historical estimates of regional per capita
GDP, thus adding to our understanding of long-term regional eco-
nomic growth and inequality in South America and Europe.

The generally accepted assumption is that before the Industrial
Revolution, the gap between the least-developed and the richest
nations of the world could not have been wide, though it has
widened dramatically since the Industrial Revolution. We should
emphasize, Tuttavia, that despite the unarguable relevance of the
national scale, this collection of articles, with its use of new regional
dati, follows Krugman in suggesting the importance of a ﬁner-
grained causal analysis of economic divergence since the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution.3

This kind of regional investigation provides new answers to
old questions: Per esempio, why did fast and sustained economic
growth occur only in certain regions; why did growth concentrate
in certain regions; how, and how much, did the Industrial Revo-
lution accelerate the advance of regional inequality; how steady
was the speed of this process; and to what extent did transportation
infrastructure inﬂuence regional growth?

THE INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS This special issue opens with an
article entitled “Reconsidering the Industrial Revolution,” in
which E. Anthony Wrigley recounts the strategies ﬁrst employed
in England and Wales to escape the constraints that energy require-
ments placed on growth in pre-industrial economies. Embarking

Paul Krugman, “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography,” Journal of Political Economy,

3
XCIX (1991), 483–499.

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E C O N O M I C G R O WT H A N D R E G I O N A L I N E Q U A L I T Y

| 5

on a path to sustained growth implied having access to a much
larger energy supply than ever before. Inoltre, the new pro-
duction systems needed new forms of energy capable of being
stored. First coal and then oil were the instruments of this trans-
formation. Wrigley disentangles the events and discoveries that
culminated in Britain leading the Industrial Revolution.

Wrigley’s arguments lie at the very heart of the issue that this
collection seeks to elucidate. Like the other authors herein, Wrigley
deploys statistics about population and railway transport, paying
particular attention to urbanization and the related deep-seated
changes that accompanied fast-paced economic growth. His infor-
mation about real wages and energy consumption is essential for a
better understanding of the myriad components responsible for
modern economic change. An important part of his story is why
continental Europe lagged behind Britain until the late eighteenth
century and why Britain’s long-standing economic advantage rapidly
came to a close during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Emanuel Felice’s “The Socio-Institutional Divide: Explaining
Italy’s Regional Development over the Long Run” brings a com-
pelling, updated perspective to the persistent North–South divide
in Italy. Felice brings new data, which are more precise than those
previously employed on the subject, to bear on recent insights
from the international literature about economic development.
In his examination of the pre-conditions for growth at the time
of Italy’s uniﬁcation (1861), he uses not only GDP data but also
social indicators that provide further information about the geog-
raphy of the country, its institutions, the external exploitation of the
South, and Italian culture in general. Felice places special emphasis
on the inﬂuence that social and institutional factors on a national
scale had on the persistence of Italy’s deep regional divisions.

Continuing with the theme of national growth, Erik Buyst in
“The Causes of Growth during Belgium’s Industrial Revolution”
traces the evolution of regional imbalances in Belgium since the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution. He highlights two signiﬁcant
facts: (1) Quello, conﬁrming Williamson’s hypotheses, the onset of
Belgium’s Industrial Revolution was followed by a marked increase
in regional inequality in the nineteenth century and (2) that this
increase did not cause any radical changes in the hierarchy of the
country’s richest to poorest provinces. These ﬁndings suggest that
the foundations of the economic geography of Belgium’s Industrial

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6 | M A R T Í – H E NN E B E R G A ND T IR A D O – F A B RE G A T

Revolution may well have been established during the period of
the ancien régime rather than during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth
century, as maintained in the traditional literature. Buyst’s study
supports the revisionist view of a decided continuity between the
eighteenth century and the period corresponding to Belgium’s
Industrial Revolution.

The special issue closes with two articles about regional in-
equality from a supranational perspective—region-based studies of
the territories within various states in Europe and South America.
Along these lines, “The Origins of Economic Growth and Regional
Income Inequality in Latin Europe, 1870–1950,” by Alfonso Diez-
Minguela, Julio Martinez-Galarraga, M. Teresa Sanchis-Llopis, E
Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat, depicts an initial period of growth
characterized by economic stability within a context of increasing
globalization. Next came a second phase marked by considerable
ﬂuctuations and a halt to international economic integration, Quale
had a deﬁnite inﬂuence on the economic policies of the countries
studied.

This article provides homogeneous estimates of per capita
regional GDP for 171 regions. These data reveal a distinct upsurge
in regional inequality between 1870 and 1910—a period known
as the First Globalization—when industrialization spread across
Europe. Inequality subsequently remained steady between 1910
E 1950. The evolution of inequality during these two initial
stages of development followed the inverted U-shaped pattern.

Close analysis of new evidence relating to the period from
1910 A 1950 discovers an additional phenomenon that is still
observable in contemporary Europe—the polarization of regional
economic inequality. By 1950, most of southern Italy and most of
the regions in Spain and Portugal were already at the bottom of
the income-distribution ranking, whereas the richest regions clus-
tered in northern France and northern Italy. The core–periphery
structure that currently characterizes the four nations had its origins
in the diffusion of the second Industrial Revolution that occurred
during the interwar years.

“Growth and Regional Disparities in South America, 1890–
1960,” by Marc Badia, Esteban Nicolini, and Henry Willebald,
analyzes the factors that determined regional economic growth, E
their implications for territorial inequality, in Argentina, Chile, E
Uruguay between 1890 E 1960. Again, the period under scrutiny

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| 7

E C O N O M I C G R O WT H A N D R E G I O N A L I N E Q U A L I T Y
is signiﬁcant because it permits a study of two markedly different
historical contexts. The ﬁrst, which lasted until the economic crisis
of the 1930s, was a period when the economies of these countries
made considerable advances, largely because of their integration
with the international economy. At that time, the territories best
endowed with natural resources and agricultural products were able
to export them and thus register the highest rates of economic
growth. The second period saw these states launch policies of import
substitution industrialization (ISI). Di conseguenza, economic growth
became centered in regions that enjoyed comparative advantages
for the industrial activity that met the requirements of their respec-
tive national economies.

Under these conditions, territorial inequality in these three
countries followed a U-shaped pattern instead of the inverted
U-shaped pattern observed in the European cases. Inoltre,
this experience in Latin America contradicts suggestions by recent
works that globalization tended to exacerbate territorial inequality.
The opening of these new markets offered opportunities for
growth in what had previously been relatively poor regions, facil-
itating an incipient form of regional income convergence. From
the 1930s onward, the return to protectionism and the promotion
of policies aimed at import substitutions—and particularly manu-
factured goods—reinforced the hegemony of the richest and most
densely populated regions. These regions subsequently exploited
their undeniable advantages for the location of industrial activity.
Hence, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay witnessed a substantial
growth in territorial inequality between 1930 E 1960.

One of the main objectives of this special issue is to understand the
implications of the long-term dynamics of regional imbalance by
examining a varied group of countries. The ﬁrst important source
of added value in this collection is the inclusion of different indi-
cators at the regional level—population density, economic growth,
rates of urbanization, and transportation infrastructure—to high-
light regional economic imbalances. It also enables an analysis of
these factors from a historical perspective, providing a narrative
about the historical roots of economic growth and an explication
of the circumstances responsible for regional imbalance.

This collection makes a signiﬁcant threefold contribution to
the current debate about economic growth and inequality from

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8 | M A R T Í – H E NN E B E R G A ND T IR A D O – F A B RE G A T

both a global and a regional angle: (1) by analyzing an extended
historical period from the second half of the nineteenth century to
the present day; (2) by using a new historical data set for per capita
regional GDP; E (3) by tracking the evolution of regional in-
equalities across such extensive areas as England/ Wales, Italy,
Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
The contributions presented herein show how processes of
economic growth with different origins resulted in uneven devel-
opment. Tuttavia, contrary to Williamson’s notion, the start of
the growth process did not always result in greater inequality.
The increase in, or absence of, territorial inequality depended on
initial regional conditions. Per esempio, those parts of South
America where economic growth was based on competitive ad-
vantages associated with the availability of natural resources wit-
nessed a reduction in territorial inequalities.

Nonetheless, this special issue reveals that contexts in which
economic growth entailed a drive toward industrialization were
likely to foster an increase in territorial imbalance. In such cases,
the origins of this unequal growth may well be traceable to insti-
tutional and economic conditions from a distant past still leaving
their mark in the nineteenth century. Inoltre, the institutional
framework responsible for opening and closing national econo-
mies (globalization versus de-globalization) is not directly related
to the exacerbation or amelioration of inequality. Di conseguenza, an
increase in territorial inequality sometimes occurred in contexts
of de-globalization, and in others, the opposite was true.

This collection detects a geographical pattern in the distribution
of rich and poor regions. This arrangement does not correspond,
Tuttavia, to the position of these territories within their respective
states but, instead, tends to follow a supranational arrangement.
The theoretical framework of the New Economic Geography ex-
plains it by the ability of domestic or foreign markets to capture
the potential for regional growth. In this respect, this special issue
suggests that the design of transportation networks can exert a strong
inﬂuence on regional economic growth. Public policy can therefore
prove to be a highly effective means for affecting long-term terri-
torial imbalance rather than just a conjunctural measure.

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