Section I of this article deals with the political, economic and social conditions of Spain in the 1920s and at the arrival of the Republic. Section II analyses the agrarian reforms during the Second Republic. Section III examines the monetary and fiscal policies of the Republican governments. Section IV covers a comparative analysis of the impact of the Great Depression in Spain and in other European countries. Section V addresses the economic and political situation in Spain in 1935. A Conclusion summarizes the assessments presented in this article.
There has been in the last decades a significant increase in the quantity and quality of the economic data on the 1930s. These include the studies of Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Spanish Economic Growth, 1850–2015. (London: Palgrave Studies in Economic History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Jordi Maluquer, España en la economía mundial. Series largas para la economía española (1859-2015) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Económicos, 2016), Francisco Comín, Fuentes cuantitativas para el estudio del Sector Público en España, 1801-1980 (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, Monografía no. 40, 1985) and Albert Carreras and Jordi Tafunell, eds., Estadísticas históricas de España, siglos XIX – XX, (Bilbao: Fundación BBVA, 2005). Foreign references were obtained also from Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Maddison Project Database, version 2018, Maddison Project Working Paper, nr. 10, available for download at www.ggdc.net/maddison, (last visited 1 October 2019), and Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics. Europe, 1750-2000 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).
The tables and figures attached to this article have taken into consideration long-term statistical series, covering the periods 1913-1936 for Spanish internal data and 1919-1939 for international comparisons.