Convergence and divergence of numeracy: the development of age heaping in Latin America from the seventeenth to the twentieth century¹

Abstract

This study makes the first systematic attempt to trace the long‐term development of Latin American numeracy, a phenomenon of great interest to economic historians in that it serves as an accurate gauge of human capital development. In order to approximate basic numeracy we use age‐heaping techniques. We find that Latin America was on a path of convergence with western Europe during the early eighteenth century. During the early nineteenth century, not only did numeracy development stagnate in some Latin American countries but differences among some of them actually increased. While numeracy rates in Argentina, Uruguay, and to a lesser extent Brazil, along with Europe, underwent a significant increase in the late nineteenth century, they declined in Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. By performing a regression analysis, we find that, even when we control for investment in education, mass immigration contributed to human capital formation.

Globalization and educational inequality during the 18thto 20thcenturies: Latin America in global comparison

“…An important question is whether our various sources are representative of the whole society during the period under study. This issue has been studied intensively by Manzel and Baten (2010) who used mostly the same sources to study long-term trends. The population enumerations were supposed to have universal coverage in the whole area considered as well as in all social strata.…”

“…Most early counts were focused on limited regions or cities within a country. Larger censuses were carried out after the mid-18 th century, covering a higher share of the national population (Table 1; Manzel and Baten 2010). For the post-colonial period, censuses of the republics were carried out mostly after the mid-19 th century, while the early 19 th century is clearly less documented.…”

“…Were Indios or slaves of African origin sometimes omitted from the padrones? The direct comparison of population structure by ethnic group given in the literature and the composition of 18 th century padrones 8 revealed that the bias was limited Manzel and Baten (2010; Table 3). In some Mexican censuses, there was some under-representation of American Indios and in one of the Buenos Aires padrones there was some under-representation of African Americans, but in general the samples were quite representative in terms of ethnicity.…”

“…Is it possible that perhaps only the head of the household answered for the whole house? Manzel and Baten (2010) applied (F'note continued) that the higher the secondary school completion shares of the attainment distribution, the larger the educational «middle class», which might imply less educational inequality. Frankema (2008) finds that grade distribution in Latin America is skewed toward lower grades during the mid-to-late 20 th century with almost 43 per cent of the pupils leaving school without passing the first grade and more than 70 per cent dropping out of school with less than 4 years of school attendance.…”

Numeracy of Africans, Asians, and Europeans during the early modern period: new evidence from Cape Colony court registers

“…Baten and Blum, ‘Growing tall but unequal’. Latin America may be the exception; see Manzel, Baten, and Stolz, ‘Convergence’, p. 957.…”