Das Vermächtnis der Plantagenwirtschaft: Bildungsungleichheiten und Entwicklung in einer vergleichenden Perspektive

Abstract

This paper shows that differences in educational outcomes within and between Asia and Latin America are caused in part by the type of agricultural production system. It is argued that, in contrast to states organized around family farming, countries exhibiting plantation-style agriculture tend to neglect broadly based educational policies. Plantation owners may have curtailed educational expansion to impede political mobilization of rural workers in order to secure a cheap supply of hired labour and monopolize the political arena. Results of panel data analysis as well as OLS cross-sectional regressions show that the export of crops grown on large landholdings substantially decreases secondary education attainment levels and governments' investments in secondary schooling. Simultaneously, these same exports are associated with higher tertiary education levels. The quantitative analysis is complemented by historical evidence of agrarian elites attempting to hinder the development of mass schooling in many countries.

Education and development projects in Brazil (1932-2004): political economy perspective

“…Even with the expansion during this period of a middle class that demanded more schooling, this was not enough to make massive educational policies effective. Other similar answers are provided by Wegenast (2009aWegenast ( , 2009b and Schwartzman (2004). In this sense, while answering from different perspectives, the literature in general argues that the main reason for the backwardness of the Brazilian education was political interests.…”

The Expansion of Mass Education in Twentieth Century Latin America: A Global Comparative Perspective

“…Second, it leaves room for the possibility that educational inequality resides mainly in quality differences rather than in differences in years of schooling attained. This view has recently been empirically substantiated in a couple of papers by Hanushek and Woesmann (2009a;2009b). Cole et al (2004) use educational attainment data from the Barro and Lee database for a more unconventional argument: a lack of catching up growth in Latin America can definitely not be explained by slow educational development.…”

“…19 Tim Wegenast's recent study is one of the rare attempts to establish a direct empirical link between asset inequality and educational performance, see Wegenast (2009a) and(2009b); for a more general empirical study on the relationship between natural resource abundance and income economic inequality see Spilimbergo, Londoño and Székely (1999).…”

Cana, café, cacau: agrarian structure and educational inequalities in Brazil

“…Studying education across the New World from 1800 to 1925, Mariscal and Sokoloff (2000) find that differences in land inequality explain differences in public provision of schooling, arguing that land disparities create collective action problems within the political units responsible for education funding. Wegenast (2009) uses countries' export composition to proxy for the agrarian structure and concludes that the export of cash crops has led countries to underinvest in secondary schooling and partly explains the educational differences found between Asia and Latin America.…”

“…Whether a country's agriculture is characterized by large plantations based on cheap hired labor or rather organized around family farming may have left long-lasting footprints on its educational systems. Although some macrocomparative studies have analyzed this issue in one or another way (Lindert 2004a;Erickson and Vollrath 2004;Galor et al 2009;Wegenast 2009), the causal mechanisms linking agrarian production systems to human capital formation have been largely omitted. In a first attempt to address this shortcoming, this paper probes more deeply into the relationship between agrarian structure and education, trying to capture large landowners' attitudes toward mass schooling.…”