Education Performance: Was It All Determined 100 Years Ago? Evidence From São Paulo, Brazil

Irineu de Carvalho Filho and Renato Colistete ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper deals with institutional persistence in long-term economic development. We investigate the historical record of education in one of the fastest growing and most unequal societies in the twentieth century – the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Based on historical data from an agricultural census and education statistics, we assess the role played by factors such as land concentration, immigration and type of economic activity in determining supply and demand of education during the early twentieth century, and to what degree these factors help explain current educational performance and income levels. We find a positive and enduring effect of the presence of foreign-born immigrants on the supply of public instruction, as well as a negative effect of land concentration. Immigrant farm-laborers established their own community schools, and pressured for public funding for those schools or for public schools. The effects of early adoption of public instruction can be detected more than one hundred years later in the form of better test scores and higher income per capita. These results are suggestive of an additional mechanism generating inequality across regions: the places that received immigration from countries with an established public education system benefited from an earlier adoption of the revolutionary idea of public education.

Keywords: Public education; Brazil; Economic History; Economic Development; Coffee; Immigration; Land Inequality; Toryism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 N16 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-08-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-his and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:24494

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