Real wages, inequality and globalization in latin america before 1940

By 1914, there were huge economic gaps between the Southern Cone plus Cuba and the rest of Latin America. Can they be explained by the varying ability of these countries to exploit the first great globalization boom after about 1870? Or did the gaps appear much earlier? And what about the gaps between Latin America and the Mediterranean, let alone with industrial leaders like Britain? What role did geographic isolation, globalization and demographic forces play in the process? Conventional GDP estimates are much too coarse to confront these questions. This essay uses a new data base on real wages and relative factor prices for seven Latin American and three Mediterranean regions, the latter being a source of so many of immigrants for the former. These ten regions, plus comparative information from Britain and the United States, form the data base for the paper.