Natural land productivity, cooperation and comparative development

Abstract

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its e¤ect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent e¤ect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development across the globe. Exploiting exogenous sources of variations in land productivity across a) countries; b) individuals within a country, and c) migrants of di¤erent ancestry within a country, the research establishes that lower level of land productivity in the past is associated with more intense cooperation and higher levels of contemporary social capital and development.

From agriculture to manufacturing: How does geography matter?

“…This article, however, explains the asymmetric evolution across societies by considering the entire geographical environment and resources, which are advantageous for agricultural production; (2) Ashraf and Galor (2012) do not take into account the decline in fertility in explaining the development process across societies, whereas this article considers such an effect. It is interesting to note an alternative mechanism recently advanced by Litina (2014) to explain comparative development across the globe. Litina argues that societies with high natural land productivity have reduced incentives between people to cooperate in establishing agricultural infrastructure, which is translated into social capital, relative to those with lower natural land productivity.…”

Physiological Constraints and Comparative Economic Development

“…The paper is also related to existing contributions that have aimed to explain observed "reversals of fortune" (Acemoglu et al 2002;Olsson and Paik, 2016a,b;Litina, 2016;. The present study differs from previous contributions on two fronts: (i) In our focus on the role played by absolute latitude, rather than other structural characteristics, and, (ii) in the mechanism responsible for the reversal.…”

“…More recent work by Olsson and Paik (2016a,b) draws attention to a reversal involving the timing of the Neolithic revolution, whereas Litina (2016) and observe a similar phenomenon related to soil suitability for agricultural production. Olsson and Paik argue that countries that underwent the Neolithic revolution relatively early developed extractive institutions and norms emphasizing obedience to the detriment of long-run growth.…”

“…While an early Neolithic revolution allowed for a developmental head start, the cultural and institutional side effects eventually stifled development, allowing latecomers to sedentary agriculture to overtake. Litina (2016) argues that the reversal in soil quality can be explained by cultural change in favor of cooperative behavior in geographically "challenged" nations, eventually allowing them to industrialize comparatively early. Finally, argue that rich inland soil productivity, relative to the productivity of the nearby ocean, lead to less coastal orientation of economic activity early on, and thereby to the accumulation of capabilities that were less favorable to industrialization.…”

The Origins of Cultural Divergence: Evidence from a Developing Country

“…5 Some remarkable traits are gender equality (Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn 2013;Hansen, Jensen, and Skovsgaard 2015), trust (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011;Becker et al 2016;Bigoni et al 2016;Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales 2016;Litina 2016), preferences for redistribution (Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln 2007;Basten and Betz 2013), and various others such as anti-semitic attitude (Voigtländer and Voth 2012), time preference (Galor and Özak 2016), and civic values (Lowes et al 2017). See Nunn (2012Nunn ( , 2014 and Spolaore and Wacziarg (2013) for critical reviews of the literature.…”