Good, Bad, and Ugly Colonial Activities: Do They Matter for Economic Development?

By Miriam Bruhn, F. Gallego. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2012

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Levels of development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era, when colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country. We present evidence consistent with the view that “bad” activities (those that depended heavily on labor exploitation) led to lower economic development today than “good” activities (those that did not rely on labor exploitation). Our results also suggest that differences in political representation (but not in income inequality or human capital) could be the intermediating factor between colonial activities and current development.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57258540f107c5a0341f3e98b95f075feec8af3d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

F. Caicedo

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence (2020, background): “Logics of colonial extraction and exploitation have “mutated but also maintain continuity in the present day”, supporting post-colonial economic inequalities which have been empirically demonstrated to be tied to historic colonial activity (Bruhn and Gallego 2012; Fanon 1961).”
The Development Effects of the Extractive Colonial Economy: The Dutch Cultivation System in Java (2019, unknown): “Section 4 examines the long-run impacts of the (3)In other work in the Americas about the persistent development impacts of different crop types - including sugar - landholdings of settlers of European descent are also argued to play an important role in generating persistence (Engerman and Sokoloff”
The Mission: Human Capital Transmission, Economic Persistence, and Culture in South America* (2018, background): “This piece relates more speci cally to the literature on the long-term impact of colonialism and colonial investments (Feyrer and Sacerdote, 2009; Huillery, 2009; Dell 2010; Bruhn and Gallego 2012; Becker et al. 2014; Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya 2014; Jedwab et al. 2014).”
Domestic Institutions as a Source of Comparative Advantage (2013, unknown): “Bruhn and Gallego (2012) extend the Engerman and Sokoloff (1997) thesis in their comparative study of North and South America.”