Natural Land Productivity, Cooperation and Comparative Development

ssion Paper Series 14-16, Center for Research in Economic Analysis, University of Luxembourg.
Abstract: This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development across the globe. Exploiting exogenous sources of variations in land productivity across a) countries; b) individuals within a country, and c) migrants of different ancestry within a country, the research establishes that lower level of land productivity in the past is associated with more intense cooperation and higher levels of contemporary social capital and development.