Export Trade in Spain
Commercial pressure groups in Spain (notably the Consulates of Cádiz and Seville) tried to control the benefits of export trade from the American colonies in every way, with diverse results. For example, the Real Compañia de Filipinas (The Royal Philippine Company) was created in 1785 to connect the port of Manila directly with that of Cádiz and thereby eliminate both the Manila Galleon (which linked Manila to Acapulco) and the traditional control over this traffic exercised by the colonial merchants. Arguments soon erupted between the suppliers based in the Mexican Consulate and the Andalucian shipowners.

As regards intraregional flow, the growth that might have been expected never fully materialized. True, there was demographic expansion, urban concentration, and development in the mining sector. Nevertheless, the market was not present to support and take advantage of these developments. Bartering increased and local self-sufficiency was widespread. The migration from the country to the town did not take place in the context of a manufacturing sector that could absorb such a labor force; thus, urban concentration brought not an upswing in commercial transactions and scale economies but rather an increase in unemployment and poverty. By the end of the eighteenth century, increased taxation pressure and inflation reduced available revenues. The reduction in real salary (at fixed prices) and real disposable income (net salary after tax) indicated an over-exploitation of labor; consequently, the demand for secondary and tertiary products did not increase, making it impossible for the internal market to extend either horizontally or vertically. Some self-sufficient campesinos (peasants) could not increase their consumption via the market, and the urban workers scarcely had sufficient income to feed themselves, having to use their family connections in the country to cover their most immediate necessities or migrate and thereby go back to self-sufficiency.

The hacienda owners, on the other hand, did not see any necessity for investing in new technology in view of the drop in relative terms of the cost of labor. In turn the growth of currency exports by the Royal Exchequer limited public spending on American soil, and the increase in the export of goods metamorphosed into a process that bled the American economies of legal tender (the extraction of currency was higher in some years than the total production of the mint). It appears to be no accident that the speed of monetary circulation (via bills of exchange, drafts, money orders, compensatory payments) had to increase by the end of the eighteenth century to compensate for the drain on payment methods imposed by the new colonial policy. Growth in terms of foreign trade meant poverty for internal markets. Population increase in the central areas was not as intense as traditional historical accounts have indicated. From 1650 to 1690, annual rates of population increase have been given as 2 percent; between 1690 and 1736 they oscillated between 0.33 percent and 2.9 percent and from 1737 results became negative.