Henry Willebald (Universidad de la República, Uruguay)
Comentario a cargo de Tommy Murphy
The aim of this paper is to identify different distributive patterns in the settler economies (Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, New Zealand and Uruguay) during the First Globalization (1870-1914). We present our methodological decisions, discuss our results and propose some conjectures about the long-run evolution of inequality. As agriculture was the most important productive activity in the settler economies and one of the main sectors in leading the land frontier expansion, a study of the evolution of the distribution in this sector will be of interest. We focus on two dimensions of the distributive process in the agrarian sector. We consider inequality in terms of assets –land distribution– and incomes –functional income distribution– because both dimensions have immediate relationships with developmental issues. Asset distribution is a common subject in the literature but up to now it has scarcely been measured and analyzed from a comparative perspective. First, we discuss the land distribution in settler economies –and accept regional disparities in large economies– on the eve of WWI. After that, we present the notion of functional income distribution and discuss the existence of two distributive patterns: in one of these, the territories that were British colonies, it was capitalist relationships that predominated, and in the other, in former colonies of Spain, economic relationships were based on agrarian rental incomes. During the period, income distribution worsened in the Australasian economies and Canada, but it worsened even more in the South American Southern Cone countries, and these two groups had different dynamics of expansion onto new land. Our conjecture is that different endowments of natural resources explain, at least partially, these differences.
Keywords: Land ownership systems, functional income distribution, settler economies
JEL: N26, N27, N36, N37
