This PhD research, which is in its second year- step, is part of the GINI (Growth, Inequality & Institutions) project that conducts a comparative study of the inequality and economic development in four pre-industrial European areas. The aim of the project is twofold: (1) To give new impetus to the current tendency in economic and social research to bring in the past in contemporary questions of unequal welfare and growth. (2) To explain the mechanisms behind the diverging trajectories of regional economic growth based on the hypothesis that there is a relation between this (long-term) growth and inequality in the rural environment.
Since land was, before the Industrial Revolution, the basis of economic development and main source of income, power and negotiation between different social groups, understanding the relationship between access to land and land distribution, as well as the consequent socio-economic inequality derived from it, is the main goal of my PhD. Therefore, I intend to study economic growth from a socio- economic approach, in order to examine not only economic inequality, but also social uneven distribution, and in which manner the interrelation of both types of inequality influenced economic development in a micro area.