Human Development as Positive Freedom: Latin America in Historical Perspective

Leandro Prados de la Escosura ()

IFCS - Working Papers in Economic History.WH from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Instituto Figuerola

Abstract: How has Latin America's wellbeing evolved over time? How does Latin America compare to today's developed countries (OECD, for short)? What explains their differences? These questions are addressed using an historical index of human development. A sustained improvement in wellbeing can be observed since 1870. The absolute gap between OECD and Latin America widened over time, but an incomplete catching up &-largely explained by education- occurred since 1900, but faded away after 1980, as Latin America fell behind the OECD in terms of longevity. Once the first health transition was exhausted, the contribution of life expectancy to human development declined.

Keywords: Latin; America; Human; Development; Positive; Freedom; Life; Expectancy; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I00 N36 O15 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ets
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... ac943fb8d89b/content (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Human Development as Positive Freedom: Latin America in Historical Perspective (2015)
Working Paper: Human Development as Positive Freedom: Latin America in Historical Perspective (2015)
Working Paper: Human Development as Positive Freedom: Latin America in Historical Perspective (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cte:whrepe:wp15-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFCS - Working Papers in Economic History.WH from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Instituto Figuerola
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().