This effect is as large as that of an additional year of schooling.Īlong the same lines, we find a significant negative relationship between the Inca Road and child malnutrition: attendance at a school located within 20 km of the Inca Road reduced the probability of being malnourished by 3.4 percentage points (a reduction of around 8%) in 2005. We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between the Inca Road and hourly wages: residence within 20 km of the Inca Road increases hourly wages by around 10.5% as compared to wages in other areas during 2007–2017. Households (in blue) that are located within the treatment grid cells form our sample of treated households and those located in the control grid cells, our control households.įigure 1 Treatment and control groups in the proximity of the Inca Road ![]() We define grid cells crossed by the Road as the treatment group (in red) and adjacent grid cells as the control group (in green). We do so by delimiting our study area to locations near the Inca Road that had similar relevant development characteristics before the road system was constructed.įigure 1 shows our empirical strategy in graphic form. We construct a valid counterfactual for households classified as having been impacted by the Road in the spirit of Dell (2010). To estimate the long-term effect of the Inca Road, we test whether residence close to the Road has influenced today’s development outcomes. ![]() If this assumption proves to be correct, then it is a mistake to set the colonial period as the starting point for a study of development.įinally, our paper also contributes to the literature regarding the persistence of gender roles shaped by historical cultural beliefs about the appropriate role of women (Alesina et al. For Latin America, no evidence on pre-colonial institutions has been gathered however, based on the evidence for Africa, we strongly suspect that Latin American pre-colonial institutions account for a large part of the differences observed in current national and regional development processes. They identify the emergence of market towns from the early medieval period to the modern era as a robust and economically meaningful mechanism that reflects the persistent effects of the Roman road network on economic activity.ĭespite this vast body of literature, the role of pre-colonial forms of organisation has been explored less thoroughly and has mainly focused on African development (see Nunn 2008). (2019), for instance, explore the link between infrastructure investments made during antiquity and economic activity in Rome. This literature has largely been concerned with the impact of public goods provision over long periods of time. Our study contributes to the literature on ancient infrastructure’s long-run impact on economic development (Spolaore and Wacziarg 2013, Nunn 2014, and Ashraf and Galor 2018). Moreover, these effects are around 40% greater among women. Over the long term, the existence of the Inca Road has boosted average hourly wages by 20% and reduced informality by six percentage points. ![]() We find that the historical presence of the Inca Road improved educational, development, and labour outcomes: it increased the average level of educational attainment by one year and decreased stunting among children by 5%. 2021), we therefore undertake the first empirical examination of how the Inca Road has shaped subsequent economic development. ![]() It was thus a linchpin of the colonial economy in the New World (Glave 1989).ĭespite the role the Inca Road played in both the past and present, its impact on current development has not been studied in great depth, although the economic literature has established the fact that historical institutions can have long-lasting effects. Unlike how they treated the Inca’s agriculture or language, the Spaniards incorporated the road system into their trade-based economy and merged it with their own institutions. Not only did it play a major role during the Inca Empire but it was a key component of the economy when most of South America was under Spanish rule. The Inca Road has played a particularly important part in the region’s history. The Inca Empire was the last and greatest in a long series of highly developed cultures in pre-colonial South America.
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