Does Slavery Affect Current Income Inequality? ——Empirical Evidence From Colombia

Slavery was widely established on plantations and mines in colonial Latin America,and there is a commonly accepted opinion among economics researchers that this special form of forced labor will continue to have a significant effect on today’s society through inequalities in political power and education opportunities.However,some researchers argue that the high mobility of people in modern society will offset the early inequality and make it no longer persistent.We studied the effect of slavery on current income inequality using data from Colombia.In Colombia,most slaves worked in gold mines during the colonial era,and as a result,the distribution of slaves was very uneven among municipalities with gold mines and without.Our main empirical strategy combines the concepts of matching and instrumental variables to compare municipalities that had gold mines during the colonial period with their non-mining adjacent municipalities.By doing so,we have controlled for highly unobservable differences between neighboring municipalities.Our results suggest that slavery had statistically significant effect on 1993 and 2005 income Gini of Colombian municipalities.Municipalities that have been deeply influenced by slavery will have larger gini coefficient today.However,such effect is not significant in realistic term,for the increase of gini coefficient caused by slavery is very limited.We cautiously point out some possible explanations for such findings.It is possible that slavery in Colombia has had an impact beyond municipality boundaries and that high population mobility in the country may result in early inequality not being persistent.