Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
lifetime migrants, of which the great majority came from southern provinces
(Barbancho 1979). It is this movement, rather than regional policy, in a country
whose total 1970 population was only about 30 million, that has been responsible
for balancing between the more developed and less developed regions. As
recently as 1955, the per capita income differences had a range of 4.4 to 1.0, and
they declined to their present level entirely between that date and 1975.
Modernization and industrialization came later to Spain than to Britain, and
this is a central difference between them, affecting not only the stage of
development but also the path followed. Spain had a traditional agrarian society
and economy up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Some aspects of
agrarian reform were attempted in the nineteenth century with the dispossession
of Church properties, but this only led to the shift of large estates from clerical to
lay hands. The counterpart of the large estates was many landless labourers and
excessively small farms alongside the big underworked estates. By 1900, only 16
per cent of the working population was in the manufacturing sector of the
economy, and most people were in farming families. Even by 1930, only 26.5
per cent were in manufacturing, including construction. What manufacturing had
developed was only that common in the early phases of industrialization. In 1925,
clothing, food and drink accounted for 58 per cent of the manufacturing
employment, and was still 39 per cent in 1950. Up to 1950, the only
manufacturing in many regions of Spain was craft industry with some
modernization, such as the fish processing and packing and leather industries of
Galicia.
Spain's maximum rate of employment in manufacturing and construction was
in 1985, and the dominant sector is now services, with 52.8 per cent of
employment in 1992, as opposed to 31 per cent in industry and only 9.5 per cent
in agriculture. Part of the service growth is of tourism; contrary to most policy
initiatives for national and regional development, this service sector has proved
to be the lead sector in Spain. In an older industrialized region, Catalonia, during
the 1980s, it provided 10 per cent of GDP. In Spain as a whole, it provided over
20 per cent of GDP.
If we try to compare the Kondratiev wave model of British development with
that of Spain, there are some important differences to be noted. First, the different
technological innovations come later and from the outside, as exogenous rather
than endogenous processes. Secondly, the timing of these waves is conditioned
not so much by the innovations themselves, but by the degree of linkage to the
outside world, and by the actions of government in promoting or hindering
economic change.
A first industrial revolution may be identified in Catalonia from 1830 to 1860,
when the catalyst was the cotton and later woollen textile industry (Carreras
1990). A massive and modern industry built up in the industrial satellite towns
around Barcelona, Tarrasa and Sabadell, using large amounts of coal and steam
power like Lancashire. The industry had grown first in the eighteenth century,
but was checked by the Napoleonic Wars, by the loss of the American colonies,
