Introduction

In current Central American historiography not much attention is paid to what happened to the region's economy during the First World War. The impact of the war is virtually unknown, other than that Central American trade temporarily shifted from Europe to the United States because of the naval blockades of the former during the conflict. For the period before the 1920s, no yearly GDP estimates exist, so in order to find out about the economic impact of the war, we need to consult other economic indicators. Fortunately, the five Central American republics published foreign trade statistics on a regular basis from the first decade of the twentieth century onwards. As the Central American countries depended exclusively on imported capital goods and fossil energy, we can find out the levels of apparent consumption of these products per country by studying their yearly import statistics. I will analyse the import statistics of machinery, energy, cement and foodstuffs. The behaviour of these different import cycles can give us indications about the economic performance of each Central American country, before, during and after the First World War. The aim of this paper is to measure the impact of the war and explain why some countries suffered a serious economic setback during the conflict, while others managed to benefit from its consequences.

During the nineteenth century, the Central American countries opened their economies to the rest of the world. Costa Rica started first with the export of coffee, followed by Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.