The Legacy of Landlords: Educational Distribution and Development in a Comparative Perspective

This paper shows that differences in educational outcomes within and between Asia and Latin America are caused in part by the type of agricultural production system. It is argued that, in contrast to states organized around family farming, countries exhibiting plantation-style agriculture tend to neglect broadly based educational policies. Plantation owners may have curtailed educational expansion to impede political mobilization of rural workers in order to secure a cheap supply of hired labour and monopolize the political arena. Results of panel data analysis as well as OLS cross-sectional regressions show that the export of crops grown on large landholdings substantially decreases secondary education attainment levels and governments’ investments in secondary schooling. Simultaneously, these same exports are associated with higher tertiary education levels. The quantitative analysis is complemented by historical evidence of agrarian elites attempting to hinder the development of mass schooling in many countries.