From Bonded Laborers to Educated Citizens? Immigration, Labor Markets, and Human Capital in São Paulo, Brazil (1820-2010)

von Bruno Gabriel Witzel de Souza
Kumulative Dissertation
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:2019-02-15
Erschienen:2019-05-23
Betreuer:Prof. Dr. Stephan Klasen
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Jan Luiten van Zanden
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Holger Strulik
Zum Verlinken/Zitieren: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-7466

 

 

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Zusammenfassung

Englisch

The thesis studies the consequences of the Age of Mass Migration (1820-1920) for the socioeconomic development of the province/state of São Paulo, Brazil, in the short and long run. The determinants of immigration and the economic integration of foreigners in the short run is the object of the empirical analysis in Chapter 1. This analysis focuses on how immigrants sorted across different localities in São Paulo. The underlying question, derived from the literature on the determinants of immigration, is on how policies interact with local labor market conditions to explain the geographic and occupational allocation of immigrants. While this first approach considers institutions related to labor markets as exogenous, Chapter 2 takes a step back and explores the history of contract labor in Brazilian coffee plantations. The chapter proposes a theoretical model and collects new archival evidence to explain the immigration of agricultural bonded laborers. These were hired to work mainly under sharecropping contracts in the plantations, during the Brazilian transition from slavery. This analysis revisits the literature on the rationale of sharecropping and bonded labor, contributing with a historically specific case study. Chapter 3, in turn, broadens the time horizon of the empirical exercise to assess the impacts that a group of immigrants – namely, German-speakers – had on the accumulation of human capital in the long run. The chapter is a contribution to the literature on how immigration can change the developmental path of certain regions. Empirical results show, however, that this impact was less direct than usually assumed and that educational path dependence varied substantially between private and public schools.
Keywords: Immigration; Human capital; Bonded Labor; Sharecropping; São Paulo; Brazil
 
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