Abstract:Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the leading cities of the South Atlantic, experienced substantial growth in wealth holding during the first half of the nineteenth century. In this article, we argue that this growth is best interpreted in a broad, comparative framework, which examines these cities in relation to their internal demographic and institutional arrangements and to their external links to the Atlantic World. Our research emphasizes three major comparative findings. First, according to our samples, b… Show more
Development/History Workshop (December 2008); and, especially, generous help with the data from Amilcar Challu. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Development/History Workshop (December 2008); and, especially, generous help with the data from Amilcar Challu. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
“…Given that statistical records to estimate inequality before modern reporting started in 1989 with the ENIGH, we follow the strategy pioneered by Lindert (1981) and Lindert and Williamson (1983) to convert administrative proxies such as wills and probates into comparable units for the contemporary population 1 . The use of administrative data, from tax records to wills and probates has been in popular use in the study of inequality over recent decades, for example in Kicza (1982) and Chowning (1999), the ground-breaking study by Johnson and Frank (2006), and more recently Piketty (2014), Lindert and Williamson (2016) and Alvaredo et al (2018).…”
This paper engages with and aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the role of economic and political elites in inequality dynamics and their reproduction over time. We reconstruct the distribution of wealth employing a sample of wills from the El Colegio de Sonora database covering the period of 1871-1910. We show that the rapid industrialisation and modernisation process that occurred in northern Mexico during the late-19th and early-20th centuries led to a continuous increment in wealth concentration at the top of the distribution. The Gini index measure of 0.58 for the 1871-1885 period rose to 0.80 in 1901-1910. Rather than a natural or «Kuznetsian» inevitability fundamental (kuznetsian) necessity, however, our subsequent analysis of the wills of the upper classes suggests a critical role played by the political economy at the time and highlights the importance of control over natural resources on inequality dynamics.
Prados de la Escosura. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
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