Life on the Edge: elites, wealth, and inequality in Sonora 1871-1910

Diego Castañeda Garza and Alice Krozer

Serie documentos de trabajo del Centro de Estudios Económicos from El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Económicos

Abstract: This paper’s contribution is a reconstruction of the distribution of wealth employing a sample of wills from El Colegio de Sonora database for the years 1871-1910. We show that the rapid industrialisation/modernisation process that ensued in northern Mexico during the late 19th and early 20th century lead to a continuous increment in wealth concentration at the top of the distribution, going from a Gini index measure of 0.48 in 1871 to 0.79 in 1910. Rather than a fundamental (kuznetsian) necessity, however, our data suggests a critical role played by the political economy at the time in a gerschenkronian fashion and highlight the importance of the control of natural resources on inequality dynamics. The paper hereby engages with and contributes to the ongoing discussion about the role of economic and political elites in inequality dynamics and their reproduction over time.

Keywords: inequality; wealth inequality; elites; Mexico; wills; Sonora; social structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 E01 I3 N36 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-isf and nep-mac
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https://cee.colmex.mx/dts/2020/DT-2020-4.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: LIFE ON THE EDGE: ELITES, WEALTH AND INEQUALITY IN SONORA 1871-1910 (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:emx:ceedoc:2020-04

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