IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/reveco/v31y2013i01p41-72_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Transportation Costs and the Social Savings of Railroads in Latin America. The Case of Peru

Author

Listed:
  • Zegarra, Luis Felipe

Abstract

This article estimates the social savings of the railroads in Peru in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The construction of railroads made it possible for Peruvians to substitute the traditional system of mules and llamas, although only for a few routes. Using primary and secondary sources, I estimate the social savings for 1890, 1904, 1914 and 1918. Social savings ranged between 0.3 per cent and 1.3 per cent of GDP in 1890, but then increased to a range between 3.6 per cent and 9.4 per cent of GDP in 1918. The social savings of railroads in Peru were comparable to those for the United States and Great Britain but were much lower than those for Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, largely because Peru had very few railroads.

Suggested Citation

  • Zegarra, Luis Felipe, 2013. "Transportation Costs and the Social Savings of Railroads in Latin America. The Case of Peru," Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 31(1), pages 41-72, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:reveco:v:31:y:2013:i:01:p:41-72_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0212610913000013/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vincent Bignon & Rui Esteves & Alfonso Herranz-Loncán, 2015. "Big push or big grab? Railways, government activism, and export growth in Latin America, 1865–1913," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(4), pages 1277-1305, November.
    2. Alfonso Herranz-Loncán & Johan Fourie, 2018. "“For the public benefit”? Railways in the British Cape Colony," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 22(1), pages 73-100.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:reveco:v:31:y:2013:i:01:p:41-72_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/rhe .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.