Periodic Reporting for period 1 - REGROWTH (How a Nation is Born: Reconstructing Four Centuries of Brazilian Economic Growth)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-09-01 al 2024-08-31
The problem addressed by the project was to build the first-ever prices and wage series, and most importantly, internationally comparable real wages and GDP per capita series for Brazil for 350 years from the 16th century to the year of the first income census (1570–1920). In addition, we also focus on the impacts of the Atlantic slave trade on economic development. Employing modern causal inference techniques, we have provided the first causal estimate in the literature of the effect of the slave trade prohibition laws on wages and inequality. Understanding how a nation is born and tracing out its economic growth in the very long run, as we are doing for Brazil, is of fundamental importance for understanding how economic growth and price stability works in a historical perspective which can give us many insights for policy and securing an equitable, sustainable economic growth for the future generations.
The work carried out during the fellowship towards the achievement of each listed objectives were the visit of 18 historical archives, either in person or by 11 hired research assistants. From these archives thousands of handwritten pages were photographed, read and transcribed, along with printed primary and secondary sources. The resulting database with entries for population, prices for various types of goods, prices for enslaved people, and wages for a diversity of occupations, including for men, women, free and enslaved, has over 40.000 observations. In addition, I have taken the following steps: 1) Creation of replicable programming scripts in the R language to clean the data entries, generate graphs and tables, and apply the latest quantitative econometric methods to analyze the data. 2) Submission to top-level journals in economics and I am handling the submission processes. 3) Management of the hiring of 11 research assistants, the archival visits, and the processes of data transcription and tabulation resulting in the +40.000-entry database. 4) Application to a major grant to continue this line of research. 5) Teaching a class and a workshop for undergraduate and graduate students on the topic of my project. 6) Presentation in 11 conferences and invited seminars in Portugal and abroad (Lisbon, Porto, Paris, Gothenburg, Manchester, Coventry, Vienna, Lund, and Padova). 7) Creation of a website for the project to present the papers and data sets, following the principles of open data and open access.
There are three main contributions to the state-of-the-art in economics and economic history: First, we provide new quantitative long-run micro-level and time-series data for prices and wages for a diversity of goods and occupations of the continental Europe’s largest colonial offshoot (both in terms of current population and GDP). These data (both at the micro-level and aggregated as a time series) will be accessible and can be used by other researchers to carry out new areas of quantitative historical research which was not possible until today. Second, our calculated GDP and GDP per capita series expands the comparative development literature to include Brazil which was lacking until today. This expands significantly prior literature on Brazil which has calculated the GDP only from 1850 onwards. Starting in the 16th century, we are now able to answer questions related to Malthusian dynamics, the timing of the reversal of fortune, and industrialization and the great divergence. For example, we now know that Brazil’s initial growth dynamics is both consistent with a Malthusian story and the reversal of fortune story, and that Brazil initially had the same level of income and inequality as the average European country and income decline and inequality increase is correlated with the increase in the slave trade. Third, we prove that the relationship between slave trade and income is a causal relationship. We show that the slave trade prohibition is positively related to an increase in income and decrease in inequality, significantly expanding the state of the art of the international literature which, to the best of our knowledge, had not yet shown causally that the end of the slave trade affected income and inequality.