A leader in an emerging new international market: the determinants of French wine exports, 1848-1938

The objective of this article is to provide an in-depth study of France''s performance in the new international wine market that began to take shape from the middle of the nineteenth century. We analyse the main determinants of its success in exporting ordinary and high-quality wine using a gravity model for both types of wine. The article shows how France lost foreign markets in the ordinary wine sector, due to difficulties in maintaining its exports, which resulted from the decrease in production caused by the phylloxera plague and increasing competition from growing numbers of producers who were more efficient at producing these types of wines. However, in the high-quality wine market, French exporters enjoyed considerable success, increasing their exports thanks to their efforts to offer a product that was highly valued abroad and the use of modern marketing and sales techniques. The exports benefited from the fall in transport costs and French colonial expansion. However, exports of both products were severely affected by a series of major events, including the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Prohibition in the US, and the Great Depression. This case study of the wine market shows that the collapse of the first globalization was not the same for all products

Determinants of Nutritional Differences in Mediterranean Rural Spain, 1840-1965 Birth Cohorts: A Comparison between Irrigated and Dry Farming Agriculture

Anthropometric studies have given much attention to the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the biological standards of living of urban populations. Instead, we know less about the evolution of height and the disparities within the rural world and how they have changed during the modern economic growth process. This article analyzes the evolution and the determining factors that would explain the inequality of the biological welfare of a group of rural populations in Mediterranean Spain. Using a database of the heights of military conscripts (N = 146, 041) of the study area, a comparison is made of the biological well-being of the cohorts born between 1840 and 1965 in different rural environments (irrigated vs. dry farming). The results show that the recruits residing in irrigated areas were taller than those in dry farming areas and that the nutritional differences were greater among the latter. The advantage of the heights in irrigated areas widened with the development of commercial agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century and, although it began to reduce from the early decades of the twentieth century, the anthropometric gap persisted throughout the period analyzed. The data also suggest that the distribution of income was also more unequal in the dry farming areas, where the diet was less varied and rich than in the irrigated areas. This situation could be largely explained by the existence of low productivity agriculture in these dry farming areas, among other possible factors

Power in non-nested models: a comparative study

The main objective of this letter is to compare two concepts of the power of a test developed in the literature on non-nested hypotheses. Using Monte Carlo techniques it is shown that both definitions of power are asymptotically equivalent, but for small samples they differ in some cases very dramatically.

Size and power of non-nested hypothesis tests and their bootstrap versions

In this paper the behaviour of various non-nested hypothesis testing procedures are studied, namely the J and JA tests and the same bootstrap-adjusted tests, using graphical methods. These methods are the P value plot, the P value discrepancy plot and the size-power graph. The size and power of the four tests are compared for all the possible nominal sizes and not only for 1% or 5%. It is found that the best test is the bootstrap-adjusted J test, given that its size is close to the nominal, independently of the nominal size, whilst it has a higher power than the JA test.

The political economy of the wine trade: Spanish exports and the international market, 1890 1935

At the end of the nineteenth century some of the less developed countries of Southern Europe often faced major problems when they sought to increase their exports of primary products. Such problems were a consequence of the tariff policies implemented by a number of their trading partners. In this article we analyse the case of the Spanish exports of ordinary table wine during the period 1890 1935. The expansion of wine production outside Europe meant that some countries in the American continent raised their tariffs to protect national production, which caused serious damage to exporters. Much more serious was the discriminatory trade policy initiated by France in 1891 which gave priority to the tariff-free importing of Algerian wine, as against the high tariffs that had to be paid by other exporters. This policy, as well as protecting French production, aimed to support her colonial policy in Algeria and seriously affected Spanish exports, as shown by our data and the econometric analysis we have carried out. The Spanish response resulted in a greater penetration of other European markets, thanks to the competitiveness of Spanish wine, but this did not prevent a serious crisis in the sector.

Protección e importaciones de madera en España (1880-1935)

This work analyses Spanish imports of rough and manufactured timber between 1880 and 1935. We start by measuring the percentage of both over Spanish wood consumption, showing the continuity of the former and the fall of the latter. Then an annual series of tariffs applicable to these products is built in order to estimate, through two different econometric models, protection effects on import evolution. According to our results, these effects were moderate. The different behaviour of rough and manufactured timber, therefore, may be explained by differences in their competitiveness, which is related to Spanish timber resources and to the integration of the domestic timber market. KEY Classification-JEL: C22, N53, N54, N73, N74Timber, International trade, Forestry, Contemporary Spain