One reason for the relatively poor development performance of many countries around the world today may be the high levels of inequality during and after colonisation. Evidence from colonies in the Americas suggests that skewed initial factor endowments could create small elites that owned a disproportionate share of wealth, human capital and political power. The Cape Colony, founded in 1652 at the southern tip of Africa, presents a case where a mercantilist company (the Dutch East India Company) settles the land and establishes a unique set of institutions within which inequality and development evolve. This paper provides a long-run quantitative analysis of trends in asset-based inequality (using Principle Components' Analysis on tax inventories) during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, allowing, for the first time, a dynamic rather than static analysis of inequality trends in a newly settled and pre-industrial society over this period. While theory testing in other societies has been severely limited because of a scarcity of quantitative evidence, this study presents a history with evidence, enabling an evaluation of the Engerman-Sokoloff and other hypotheses.
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Paper provided by Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
17/2009.
Find related papers by JEL classification: N37 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Income, and Wealth - - - Africa; Oceania D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
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Branko Milanovic & Peter H. Lindert & Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2007.
"Measuring Ancient Inequality,"
NBER Working Papers
13550, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Milanovic, Branko & Lindert, Peter & Williamson, Jeffrey, 2007.
"Measuring Ancient Inequality,"
MPRA Paper
5388, University Library of Munich, Germany.
[Downloadable!]
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