Good, Bad, and Ugly Colonial Activities: Studying Development Across the Americas

Levels of economic development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that this variation can be explained by di erences in institutions which in turn have their roots in the colonial era. Colonizers engaged in di erent economic activities in di erent regions of a country, depending on the local conditions and the supply of native labor. Some activities, such as mining and sugar cultivation, where \bad" in the sense that they depended heavily on the exploitation of labor and created extractive institutions, while \good" activities created inclusive institutions. We show that areas with bad colonial activities have 13 percent lower GDP per capita today than areas with good colonial activities. Moreover, areas that had high pre-colonial population density have lower output per capita today, independent of the type of colonial activity. We attribute this to the \ugly" fact that colonizers used the pre-colonial population as an exploitable resource, thereby also creating extractive institutions. We present some evidence that the intermediating factor between history and current development is related to institutional di erences across regions and not to income inequality or the current ethnic composition of the population. Authors' email address: [email protected], [email protected]. We would like to thank Lee Alston, Hoyt Bleakley, Esther Du o, Stanley Engerman, Kris James Mitchener, Aldo Musacchio, Jim Robinson, Je rey Williamson, and seminar participants at Adolfo Ib a~ nez University, ILADESGeorgetown, LACEA-LAMES meetings, MIT, the 2007 NBER Summer Institute, PUC-Chile, and the University of Chile for useful comments. We are also grateful to Carlos Alvarado, Francisco Mu~ noz, and Nicol as Rojas for providing excellent research assistance. The usual disclaimer applies.