No abstract

Esta investigación explora la evolución de las ratios de género en Colombia entre 1938 y 2005. Utilizando fuentes censales, los datos muestran un mayor número de población femenina en las áreas urbanas para los rangos de edad de 10 a 14 y de 15 a 19 años. El trabajo explora hipótesis en torno a la persistencia de este mayor número de niñas y mujeres jóvenes en las áreas urbanas. Específicamente, se sugiere que las mayores brechas en las ratios podrían explicarse por una reasignación de la mano de obra vía migración campo-ciudad. Dicho proceso migratorio estaría asociado a la mayor valoración económica de las mujeres en las ciudades. Es decir, las zonas urbanas experimentaron el surgimiento de nuevos sectores económicos que favorecerían la feminización de ciertas labores. Esta feminización estimularía la emigración de niñas desde el campo a la ciudad, alterando las ratios de género en el periodo analizado.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coffee became the main Colombian export, turning the country into one of the world’s leading coffee producers. This agrarian commodity provided resources for coffee-growing areas, favouring the rise of mass education. However, this paper suggests that coffee led to children ceasing to attend school to work in coffee production, thus affecting the demand for education adversely. We test this hypothesis by using different empirical strategies. We conduct panel regressions and instrumental variable cross-sectional estimates. The results show that increasing coffee production negatively affects the demand for the education of primary school-age children.

This paper analyses the processes through which racially exclusionary policies lead to lower educational outcomes for indigenous population groups in racialised and colonial settings. Focusing on Colombia and Mozambique, we show that for much of the 20th century indigenous people were unable to access the same schooling as the non-indigenous population. Most indigenous children did not advance beyond very low-quality forms of education in schools run by Catholic missions. This, together with much lower public investments in the education of indigenous peoples, put indigenous children at a comparative disadvantage for the accumulation of human capital. We show this by constructing new estimates of literacy and primary education completion rates for the different ethnic groups in Colombia and Mozambique over the 20th century. In accordance with our argument, we find systematic differences in the accumulation of human capital for the indigenous and non-indigenous populations respectively.