A történeti fejlettség és egyenlőtlenség vizsgálata strukturális egyenletek modellel a Magyar Királyság területén (1786–1910)

The study of the dynamics of economic performance has been at the forefront of research for decades: economics has contributed to the establishment of the age of the “Great Divergence” with historical GDP reconstructions. However, these are just as inaccurate as they are unsuitable for long-term time series analyses on a historical scale, or for measuring the fine-grained territorial differentiation and internal inequalities of economic and social performance. The importance of long-term processes and path dependency, and their role in contemporary territorial processes, is nevertheless unquestionable. The 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences also indicates this. The authors attempt to examine long-term processes in the historical territory of Hungary (1780–1910) by means of a latent wellbeing (composite indicator) in the absence of GDP data and due to the limited reconstruction possibilities of the HDI, by separating the causal (acting) factors and the factors reflecting development, based on the structural equation model (SEM) for the periods 1780, 1880 and 1910. While seeking explanations for classical historical questions (the role of Fogel and the railway, the speed of the regeneration of the Great Plain after the Turkish period), they estimate the change in the weight of factors influencing development (welfare) (natural conditions, built infrastructure, access to raw materials, language, religion, etc.) in the three time periods using regression models (OLS and SPARE), evaluating the performance of the absolutist and dualist political systems.