The Colonial Origins of Inequality: Exploring the Causes and Consequences of Land Distribution

Recent literature has pointed out that the historical distribution of assets is crucial in explaining the observed rigidity in post-war income inequality levels. This paper explores the causes and consequences of historical land distribution employing new and existing estimates of land inequality in cross-country OLS regressions. The two central questions addressed are 1) what explains the cross-country variation in land inequality at the end of the colonial period? 2) how does initial land inequality relate to current income inequality? It is shown that land distribution is determined by (colonial) institutions responding to relative factor endowments and natural geographic conditions as the disease environment and the feasibility to grow particular food- or cash-crops. Local conditions and institutional responses differed largely from region to region. Whereas the direct relation between initial land inequality and income inequality appears to be weak, controlling for (colonial) institutional variables reveals a strong relation between initial land inequality and current (1990’s) income inequality. High levels of income inequality, specifically in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America, are shown to have fundamentally different colonial origins.Colonial institutions, geography, factor endowments, land distribution, income distribution

The historical evolution of inequality in Latin America:a comparative analysis, 1870-2000

Current levels of income and asset inequality in Latin American countries are, from a global comparative perspective, extraordinary high. This thesis explores the roots of Latin American economic inequality in the colonial era and, subsequently, focuses on the developments in the period 1870-2000. During the so-called ‘long twentieth century’ the forces of economic modernisation reformed the composition of national income fundamentally. Industrialisation, urbanisation, an increasing pace of technological change and vigorous waves of globalisation and de-globalisation heralded the definitive decay of the rural pre-modern ‘colonial’ society. The crucial question is why Latin American countries nevertheless failed, in spite of these forces, to settle that longstanding account of the colonial past

Gender, ethnicity, and unequal opportunity in colonial Uganda: European influences, African realities, and the pitfalls of parish register data

The renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has opened up new research avenues for studying the long‐term social and economic development of Africa. A sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies and a critical stance towards the use of new sources and approaches is crucial. In this article, we engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf to show how selection biases in, and Eurocentric interpretations of, parish registers have provoked an overly optimistic account of European influences on the educational and occupational opportunities of African men and women. We confront their dataset, drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican Cathedral in Kampala, with Uganda's 1991 census, and show that trends in the literacy and numeracy of men and women born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis showing that access to schooling during the colonial era was unequal along lines of gender and ethnicity. We foreground the role of Africans in the spread of education, and we argue that European influences were not just diffusive but also divisive, and that gender inequality was reconfigured rather than eliminated under colonial rule

An Island Drifting Apart : Why Haiti mires in poverty while the Dominican Republic forges ahead

Abstract The 2010 earthquake in Haiti has exposed the extreme vulnerability of a people living in a country where the state and the economy simultaneously fail to deliver. Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, has witnessed several phases of strong economic growth since the 1870s and an encouraging transition towards democratic rule in the late 20th century. How could this Caribbean island drift apart so profoundly? Capitalizing on decades of seminal scholarship in the neo-institutional tradition North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) have developed a new conceptual framework to explain different performance characteristics of societies through time. In this study we put the latest vintage of institutional theory to the test by taking it to the case of Hispaniola. We conclude that it captures the differing internal logic of the political economy in both countries quite well, but that it is of little use to understand the effect of external (international) relations on long term development

‘Low Income Inequality, High Wealth Inequality'

Inequality studies tend to assume a positive correlation between income and wealth inequality. We doubt whether this holds for Rhineland welfare states as they seem to combine low income inequality with high wealth inequality levels. We hypothesize that publicly funded life-time income security, which is so typical for Rhineland welfare states, enhances private debt creation, while the redistributive taxes required to finance this system are targeting income rather than wealth

Productivity and employment growth:an empirical review of long and medium run evidence

This study argues that the creation of productive jobs is the key to economic growth, social development and improvements in living standards. The study provides extensive empirical evidence showing that the long run trend has been towards simultaneous growth in per capita income, productivity and employment growth. However, depending on the type of indicator and the time frame adopted, there are legitimate concerns about the distribution of the productivity and welfare gains from growth both within as well as between countries. Following the analysis of the long term growth pattern (Chapter 2), the study investigates under which conditions, in which regions and which industries a trade-off occurs between productivity and employment growth. In Chapter 3 patterns of employment-productivity trade-offs are established across regions and time periods at the macro level. Chapter 4 focuses on sectors of the economy. In Chapter 5 the study discusses the policy areas that will be most conducive to breaking or reducing the trade-off between productivity growth and employment in order to exploit the long run growth potential. We argue that, in addition to sound macroeconomic policies, a sensible role for market forces in allocating resources to their most productive uses is important. However, the key challenge is to create an institutional environment that can alleviate some of the negative effects in the short and medium run while not hampering the realisation of the long run growth potential. Support to the creation of social capabilities and national innovation systems are important policy areas to achieve this goal. While strengthening an economy’s fundamentals in the short and medium run, these also contribute to the virtuous circle of productivity growth, employment creation and poverty alleviation, which is the main theme of the ILO World Employment Report 2004