Five Centuries of Latin American Inequality

Jeffrey Williamson ()

No 15305, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues that this conclusion is not supported by what little evidence we have. The persistence view is based on an historical literature which has made little or no effort to be comparative. Modern analysts see a more unequal Latin America compared with Asia and the rich post-industrial nations and then assume that this must always have been true. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions which help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. This paper argues to the contrary. Compared with the rest of the world, inequality was not high in pre-conquest 1491, nor was it high in the post-conquest decades following 1492. Indeed, it was not even high in the mid-19th century just prior Latin America's belle époque. It only became high thereafter. Historical persistence in Latin American inequality is a myth.

JEL-codes: D31 N16 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lam and nep-ltv
Note: DAE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2010. "Five centuries of Latin American income inequality," Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, vol 28(02), pages 227-252.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15305.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:15305

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15305

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().