UB School of Economics researchers Enric Tello, Marc Badia-Miró awarded Ramon Garrabou Prize in Economic History

The UB School of Economics researchers Enric Tello and Marc Badia-Miró have been awarded the 14^th Ramon Garrabou Prize for the best article in Economic History by the Agrarian History Studies Society (SEHA). The study was published in the scientific journal Historia Agraria under the title Land-use and rural inequality profiles in the province of Barcelona in mid-nineteenth century.

The SEHA board of directors awarded the prize to this article for the “successful effort of the authors–in a powerful and innovative study–to transcend different historiographic traditions, between economic history and agroecology, to provide an answer for topics with a long historical tradition and address pressing issues of today at the same time: The impact of inequality in income distribution on the processes of agricultural growth and specialisation”. The SEHA board of directors also highlighted that the researchers “raised the right questions and got the right answers, turning the study of a regional case into a methodological challenge for the entire scientific community”.

This study examines how winegrowing specialisation in Catalonia correlated with agricultural income distribution in the municipalities of the province of Barcelona during the mid-nineteenth century. To do so, Enric Tello and Marc Badía-Miró applied common inequality indices like the Theil index along with new ones such as the inequality possible frontier (IPF) and Inequality Extraction Ratios (IER). The results confirm that inequality in agricultural income distribution was lower in predominantly winegrowing municipalities than in timber and cereal-growing ones, despite the fact that commercial specialisation and higher population densities could have extended the inequality possible frontier of those winegrowing areas in the mid-nineteenth century.

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