A Western Reversal Since the Neolithic? The Long-Run Impact of Early Agriculture

Abstract

In this article we document a reversal of fortune within the Western agricultural core, showing that regions which made early transition to Neolithic agriculture are now poorer than regions that made the transition later. The finding contrasts recent influential works emphasizing the beneficial role of early transition. Using data from a large number of carbon-dated Neolithic sites throughout the Western agricultural area, we determine approximate transition dates for about 60 countries, 280 medium-sized regions, and 1,400 small regions. Our empirical analysis shows that there is a robust negative, reduced-form relationship between years since transition to agriculture and contemporary levels of income both across and within countries. Our results further indicate that the reversal had started to emerge already before the era of European colonization.

The long‐run agglomeration effects of early agriculture in Europe

“…Figure A.3 in the Online Appendix shows some plots for these countries for different contemporary variables. This is consistent with the findings of, for example, Olsson and Paik (2020), and reflect that we are comparing less developed countries in the Middle East, where agriculture was first used, to a currently more developed European region where agriculture arrived later 4…”

“…This paper adds to an extensive literature. Most obviously, it relates to a couple of recent papers pioneering the use of archeological data, often focused on how geography and/or climate have impacted the spread of agriculture, urban agglomerations, and state formation, but less on modern economic outcomes (see, e.g., Ashraf & Michalopoulos, 2015; Bakker et al., 2021; Flückiger et al., 2022; Matranga, 2019; Mayoral & Olsson, 2019; Olsson & Paik, 2020; Radwanski & Stomper, 2020; Schönholzer, 2019).…”

“…The Pinhasi data are not the main focus of our study, but since the results differ between the two datasets in ways that we think says something about the mechanisms, we present the results from both datasets in full. The Pinhasi data have also been used earlier in the economics literature (Ashraf & Michalopoulos, 2015; Matranga, 2019; Olsson & Paik, 2020), and thus serve as an interesting point of comparison.…”

“…At the same time, countries with very early transitions are often worse off than those with intermediate (but not too late) transitions (Borcan et al., 2018). Specifically, comparing the regions of Europe and the Middle East, we see that Middle Eastern countries transitioned earlier into agriculture (and statehood) than Europe did, and are poorer today (Olsson & Paik, 2020). This also holds when using outcomes measuring democracy (Hariri, 2012) and cultural norms (Olsson & Paik, 2016).…”

Do genetically fragmented societies respond less to global warming? Diversity and climate change policies

“…Many studies indicate that legal traditions (La Porta et al, 1999;La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 2008), the length of time elapsed since the transition to sedentary agriculture (Olsson & Hibbs, 2005;Olsson & Paik, 2020) and the duration of human settlements (Ahlerup 14 These additional controls are excluded from the benchmark model mainly due to plausible concerns about reverse causation. In contrast to plausibly exogenous geographic attributes, the endogenous nature of the "proximate" causes of CLIMI, if it is not explicitly accounted for in the model specification, provides an invalid basis for statistical inference.…”