Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

National income per capita in Mexico was closer to that of Great Britain and the United States in 1800 than at any point thereafter. In that year Mexico produced more than a third of British income per head and nearly half that of the United States. Three main obstacles to economic growth have been postulated to explain Mexico's relative backwardness at the end of the colonial period: Spanish colonial rule, the system of land tenure, and the Roman Catholic Church. There were two main obstacles to economic growth in colonial Mexico which together explain most of the difference in productivity between the Mexican and US economies in 1800: inadequate transport and inefficient economic organization—geography and "feudalism". In the late nineteenth century the increasing availability of new transport and production technologies made the historic division of labor between estate-and nonestate agriculture inefficient.