Running a regression discontinuity (in two directions, since the boundary is located in geographical space) shows that health outcomes (stunted growh) and consumption are quite a bit lower for villages within the old mita boundary even today. For instance, people are nine percentage points more likely to have stunted growth, a sign of poverty. There are a number of potential explanations, but most come down to the fact that large haciendas did not develop in the colonial period within the mita region, since the state didn’t want competition for labor. Those haciendas later used their political power to ensure road networks and other inputs to production were built in their regions. Further, when the hacienda system was dismantled in the 1960s, the hacienda land was distributed to peasants, given them properly-titled land. That is, a case can be made that, at least in Peru, the particularly unequal regions, with large-scale landowners, were in some sense good for growth; this is the opposite conclusion of Engerman and Sokoloff, and a suggestion that idiosyncratic features can overwhelm more obvious theoretical insights when we talk about processes lasting hundreds of years.
“The Persistent Effects of Peru’s Mining Mita,” M. Dell (2010) | A Fine Theorem:
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