Ocultación de la riqueza rústica en España (1870–1936): acerca de la fiabilidad de las estadísticas sobre la propiedad y uso de la tierra

The Land Tax, established in Spain in 1845, suffered from the lack of an efficient system of data collection concerning ownership and the use of land. The documents known as «amillaramientos» are unworthy of trust, not only due to their high level of concealment, but also as result of the fact that they were by nature the fruits of political negociations and not of statistical research. A detailed analysis of die province of Cádiz confirms this hypothesis. As a result, the study of the Spanish agricultural growth of the second half of the nineteenth century and die first third of the twentieth century must consider the coincidence between this time period and die growing improvement in the quality of the official information concerned with cultivated areas, productions and profits. The series so far used depart, from artificially low figures, distorted by the antifiscal efforts which dominated the Spanish rural world at the time.