Market size and industrial growth in Spain during the first third of the twentieth century

Abstract

This paper emphasizes the importance of the changes that took place in the industrial sector during the first third of the twenty century, in order to understand the process of Spanish industrialization.

Against the insistence in the economic factors of the backwardness, the object of this paper is explain how the «circular causation» of the backwardness could be broken. The explanation is the growth of subsectors, inside the secondary sector; related with the new technological change, which transferred their productivity gains and promoted demand spillovers that were enough to increase the market size of the whole of the industry and the economy. In the process referred, the electric energy played a determinant role.