Coffee tastes bitter: education and the coffee economy in Colombia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

María José Fuentes-Vásquez and Irina España-Eljaiek

European Review of Economic History, 2023, vol. 27, issue 2, 174-195

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/heac013 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:oup:ereveh:v:27:y:2023:i:2:p:174-195.

Access Statistics for this article

European Review of Economic History is currently edited by Christopher M. Meissner, Steven Nafziger and Alessandro Nuvolari

More articles in European Review of Economic History from European Historical Economics Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().