El mercado mundial de vino y la competitividad de los países del Hemisferio Sur, 1961-2010
<p><strong></strong>El mercado mundial del vino ha sufrido cambios intensos en las últimas décadas tras un fuerte incremento de la competitividad de los países exportadores del hemisferio sur. Su dinamismo y el aumento de la demanda de los nuevos países consumidores han acelerado el proceso de globalización del vino. En este contexto, analizamos la competencia mundial y los principales cambios en el comercio global de vinos desde 1961 hasta 2010. El artículo muestra la distribución relativa de las exportaciones en el Viejo y el Nuevo Mundo y examina la ventaja comparativa del comercio exterior a través del índice de ventaja comparativa revelada (VCR). Concluye mostrando la…
Unequal access to food during the nutritional transition: evidence from Mediterranean Spain †
Unequal access to food is one of the main issues in nutritional history, but scarcity of sources has hampered the quantification of this phenomenon. This study uses hospital diets to address this gap. It uses records from between 1852 and 1923 concerning hospital diets in the psychiatric section of the Hospital General de Valencia (Spain), from which it is possible to infer the actual intake of nutrients for six groups of patients and members of staff. The results reveal considerable differences in terms of diet and nutrition. While the most favoured groups (nuns and well‐off patients) had by 1852 reduced their relative intake of cereals and increased that of meat, in line with the general …
Co-operative wineries: Temporal solution or efficient firms? The Spanish case during late Francoism, 1970–1981
Part of economic theory has regarded co-operative firms as useful tools for dealing with market failures during periods of economic contraction, but also as suffering severe efficiency problems during periods of growth. The main aim of this article is to test this hypothesis in the case of Spanish co-operative wineries during the years of late Francoism. In order to do this, the balance sheets of 75 co-operative firms from the 1970s have been subject to financial-ratio analyses. The main conclusion is that these firms were inefficient due to their excessive financial debt. The Spanish Francoist government promoted their creation and granted financial aid – for their value as social and econ…
Old wine in new wineskins? Understanding the cooperative movement: Catalonia, 1860-1939
Different factors have been proposed to explain why in some regions there is a greater tendency to form cooperatives. The debate remains open. In this study, we look at the spread of cooperativism within Catalonia from 1860 to 1939. Catalonia was not just the leading industrial region in Spain but also where cooperatives first emerged and had a greater presence. In line with the existing evidence, we find that cooperativism spread from coastal municipalities to the hinterland. In particular, it seems that local conditions (literacy and social capital) facilitated this process, while accessibility to the transport network and neighbouring effects also played a significant role. This work was…
Children’s Diet during the Early Stages of the Nutritional Transition. The Foundlings in the Hospital of Valencia (Spain), 1852–1931
The nutritional transition brought about profound changes in the nutrition of the European population in the 19th and 20th centuries. The predominant consumption of cereals gave way to kilocalorie-, protein-, vitamin- and mineral-rich diets that involved a greater intake of animal products. However, not all population groups underwent this transition at the same pace
Between leader-worship and member’s democracy: The consumer co-operatives in the fascist Italy
En este artículo se analiza el impacto del régimen fascista italiano en el movimiento cooperativista de consumo, tema de interés ya que supone un choque entre una cultura política antidemocrática y una cultura económica democrática. Se intenta demostrar que el régimen fascista penalizó al movimiento cooperativista de consumo de varias formas. Sin embargo, un reducido número de organizaciones constituyeron una excepción a este fenómeno y, paradójicamente, tuvieron un considerable éxito en su funcionamiento desde el punto de vista empresarial. Algunos problemas —tamaño reducido, excesiva inversión social, una visión más política que empresarial— fueron resueltos de manera frecuente por los nu…
Las bodegas cooperativas y la comercialización del vino en España durante el siglo XX
Resumen Las bodegas cooperativas surgieron con un doble objetivo: la elaboracion en comun del vino, para reducir los costes de produccion y aumentar la calidad del producto; y la venta en comun del vino, con una reduccion de los intermediarios y una mejora de la posicion de los viticultores en el proceso de comercializacion. Ambos objetivos tenian que suponer una mayor remuneracion del producto y, en consecuencia, del ingreso de los productores, que en el sector vitivinicola eran fundamentalmente pequenos agricultores familiares, enfrentados a un contexto de caida tendencial de los precios del vino. En este articulo realizamos una primera aproximacion al papel de las bodegas cooperativas en…
Adapting marketing strategies: a linguistic analysis of wine advertising in Spain, 1970-2010
The Spanish wine sector has undergone a series of changes in the last decades, particularly due to the decreasing domestic demand and the growing international competence. Consequently, Spanish wineries have had to adapt to this new situation by adopting new marketing policies. The aim of this study is to explore to what extent these new policies have been applied by means of the linguistic analysis and comparison of different types of advertisement in specialized printed media, focusing on the specific frequency of the most used word families in adverts from the 70s to present day. A corpus of 640 adverts has been compiled. We have particularly paid attention to the words that have been us…