Cana, Café, Cacau : Agrarian structure and educational inequalities in Brazil

Abstract

The present paper explores the relationship between agrarian structure and human capital formation between and within Brazil’s federal units. It is argued that whether states’ agriculture is in plantation style, based on cheap coerced labor, or organized around family farming matters for the formulation of educational policies. According to the main claim, landlords were not interested in paying higher taxes to educate the masses and curtailed the expansion of schooling in order to keep a cheap workforce and maintain their monopoly over the decision-making process. Describing several episodes in Brazil’s history of public instruction, the paper stresses the distributional conflicts over education as well as the rural aristocracy’s resistance towards broadly-targeted, citizenship-enhancing educational policies. The descriptive evidence is complemented by statistical analyses employing historical as well as more recent data. It is shown that states characterized by a more egalitarian land distribution, which are not under the dominance of powerful landlords, exhibit better educational coverage and enhanced instruction quality. They also spend more on schooling.