Publications

The long-term economic performance of Greenland has been shaped by factors like climate change and global commodity prices but more importantly by the change and persistence of economic and political institutions. This chapter discusses the combination of these factors ranging from natural-resource transitions, historical legacies, and state developmental policies. It provides a general overview to understand the interplay of endogenous and exogenous factors that have influenced the historical evolution of the Greenlandic economy.

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis assumes there is an inverted U-shape relationship between pollution and income per capita, implying an improvement in environmental quality when a growing economy reaches a high level of economic development. This study evaluated empirically the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve in Greenland for the period 1970–2018. Using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach, the results show evidence of a U-shaped EKC in Greenland instead of the hypothesized inverted U-shape. The findings indicate that Greenland had initially experienced a decoupling transition during an early development stage associated with structural conditions of a small subsistence economy. However, once the country began to expand its industry, the trend began to reverse, creating a positive and significant relationship between CO2 emissions and GDP per capita that are potentially detrimental to the Arctic natural environment.

In this paper I analyse historical interpretations and elements of the coloniality of power and gender in the historiography of Greenland. I discuss new uses and methods of analysis looking to describe historical documents without reinforcing the Eurocentric view within them. Moreover, I employ Protestant church’s historical registers of marriages of various Greenlandic towns (Nuuk, Qaqortoq, Qeqertasuaq and Aasiaat) to explore issues of gender inequality during the colonial period seeking to disentangle modern presumptions of colonial gender relations in Greenland.

Seminal literature has documented broadly the living conditions of Mexican workers before the Revolution of 1910. Various authors argue that a continuous deterioration of real wages in the preceding years of the Mexican revolution contributed to the social unrest that lead to the armed conflict. Yet, most of the quantitative evidence has focused on aggregate estimates overlooking the regional wage dynamics. Through regional historical data, this article reevaluates quantitatively the patterns of Mexican regional real wages providing new estimates for the period 1877-c.1910. The analysis reveals that a divergent pattern between sectors and regions emerged during these years. However, the study also shows that in general, locally-adjusted regional real wages remained relatively stable throughout the period.

This paper examines the long-run fiscal sustainability of the colonial finances of Spanish America. Using econometric tests of intertemporal stability and a macroeconomic budget constraint framework, the analysis revisits how the long-run fiscal dynamics of the colonial treasuries adjusted for inflation changed over time. Findings suggest that in spite of historical breakpoints associated to major financial difficulties during wartime, in general the treasuries achieved sustainable fiscal balances. However, there was a shifting pattern of fiscal sustainability between the treasuries across the colonial period.