Must-Read: Roy Elis, Stephen Haber, and Jordan Horrillo: Climate, Geography, and the Evolution of Economic and Political Systems

Must-Read: Roy Elis, Stephen Haber, and Jordan Horrillo: Climate, Geography, and the Evolution of Economic and Political Systems https://economics.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/elis_haber_and_horrillo_march_25_2017.pdf: “The agricultural economies of the hinterlands of the largest city in every country or proto-country circa 1750 predict roughly half of the variance in countries’ per capita GDP today and one-fifth of the variance in countries’ levels of democracy today….

…These facts are: the potential production of storable food kilocalories, the loss of work effort from endemic malaria, and the frequency of droughts severe enough to wipe out all storable food kilocalorie production…. For example, conditional on the historical malarial environment (which reduced potential work effort), and the historical drought proneness of a hinterland, a one standard deviation increase in the ability to generate storable food kilocalories produces roughly half a standard deviation increase in the level of democracy today. These results are robust to the addition of possible confounders such as colonial heritage, participation in the slave trade, or having a petroleum-intensive economy….

Potential production of storable food… endemic malaria, and the frequency of droughts… are also good predictors of the level of urbanization of societies circa 1800 and their level and distribution of human capital circa 1820, 1870, and 1950….