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History Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of ...

Source: globetrotter.berkeley.edu
Topic: Economic History

Sort Desciption: Journal of Economic Growth 1(1) 95124. Roy Tirthankar (2000) The Economic History of India 1857-1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University ...

Content Inside: History Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India Abhijit Banerjee Lakshmi Iyer June 2002 Abstract Do historical institutions have a persistent impact on economic performance? We analyze the colonial institutions set up by the British to collect land revenue in India and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes. Areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments agricultural productivity and investments in public goods in the post-Independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cul- tivators. We verify that these differences are not driven by omitted variables or endogeneity of the historical institutions and argue that they probably arise because differences in institutions lead to very different policy choices. Keywords: history land tenure development JEL classification: O11 P16 P51 We thank Daron Acemoglu Amiya Bagchi Sam Bowles Esther Duflo Maitreesh Ghatak Karla Hoff Kaivan Munshi Raghuram Rajan Andrei Shleifer and participants in the the MIT-Harvard Development Seminar the North- Eastern Universities Development Conference and the MIT Development Economics and Organizational Economics Lunch for helpful comments Nabeela Alam and Theresa Cheng for research assistance and Michael Kremer for help in accessing historical land tenure data. Department of Economics MIT. banerjee@mit.edu Department of Economics MIT. lakshmi@mit.edu 1 Introduction The question of the role of history is one to which economists keep returning most recently in the form of a debate about convergence. Is the destiny of a people inscribed in their genes and their geography or do they also carry around the weight of their peculiar histories? Is the present misery of so many poor nations merely a step in the gradual evolution towards a pre-ordained future ...

genes and economic performances

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