Within the European Periphery: education and labor mobility in twentieth‐century Spain

Abstract

The essay presents a novel estimate of human capital in Spain during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as measured by average years of schooling at the three main educational levels. The new estimate confirms long‐term, regional and gender trends already identified by literacy levels. It shows that most of the human capital embodied in the Spanish population until well into the second half of the twentieth century was due to expanded primary schooling rather than to secondary or university studies and it identifies the Civil War of 1936 as one of the most serious setbacks during two centuries of slow and irregular human capital accumulation. Primary schooling determined labor mobility in twentieth‐century Spain during the 1920s and the 1960s as people moved away from agriculture and into industry and services. The decision to migrate was a household rather than an individual one: the education of those who did not emigrate – elder males and females of all ages – was as relevant as that of the actual emigrants. The Civil War and the early years of the Franco regime, by contributing to the depletion of the stock of human capital, had negative effects upon labor mobility as recently as the 1960s.