Finding Eldorado: Slavery and long-run development in Colombia

Abstract

Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery remained prevalent in most countries after independence from the European powers. We investigate the impact of slavery on long-run development in Colombia. Our identification strategy compares municipalities that had gold mines during the 17th and 18th centuries to neighboring municipalities without gold mines. Gold mining was a major source of demand for slave labor during colonial times, and all colonial gold mines are now depleted. We find that the historical presence of slavery is associated with increased poverty and reduced school enrollment, vaccination coverage and public good provision. We also find that slavery is associated with higher contemporary land inequality.JEL Classification: H41, N96, O10, O54

Climate and the slave trade

“…Our results help explain the relationship between the environment and development. A large literature has emphasized the role of geographic characteristics in shaping economic outcomes in the present, in particular through their impact on institutions (Acemoglu et al, 2012a(Acemoglu et al, , 2001. Our results relate past environmental shocks in Africa to its present poverty through the adverse long-run effects of the slave trade.…”

Regional Growth and Regional Decline

“…5 The reason for the inconsistent findings is not clear, and more generally, Milanovic (2005b) notes that the field lacks a consistent terminology and approach. 6 Convergence methods have sometimes been applied to variables beyond income or output. Evans and Karras (1996) found evidence for rapid conditional convergence of TFP for the contiguous US states, and similarly rapid mean reversion for the returns to capital, computed using data on capital-output ratios and factor shares.…”

Poor Institutions, Rich Mines: Resource Curse and the Origins of the Sicilian Mafia

“…Third, in all our specifications we include area fixed effects, which allows us to identify our main effect from variations in sulfur endowment within small areas, which are plausibly homogeneous along several non-observable dimensions. Finally, following Acemoglu et al (2012), we perform additional tests of our hypothesis based on the comparison of pairs of neighboring municipalities with different sulfur endowment. Furthermore, to account for possible spatial correlation in mafia's emergence, we replicate our analysis using spatial regression methods.…”