The thesis comprises six chapters of which four papers are intended for publication. Therefore, within the chapters, I refer to the respective chapter as paper. One of the papers has already been published; the remaining three are under revision in refereed journals. To put the methodology applied in the papers in a broader context, chapter 2 gives a detailed overview of the age heaping methodology applied to approximate numerical abilities in chapters 3 to 5. The last chapter makes uses the biological standard of living to trace regional and social inequality in 19th century Peru. Chapter 2 reviews the existing literature on the age heaping technique. It presents the underlying concepts and ideas more thoroughly than it is possible in the methodology section of the papers. Besides methodological aspects, it also gives an overview of the already existing literature on age heaping in economic history. As this new research line is developing, the literature is not comprehensive yet.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine general tendencies in the development of human capital in the Iberian world. Chapter 5 and 6 focus on more specic questions concerning its development in particular countries, namely Spain and Peru. These studies allow an in depth-study of the economic and social circumstances inuencing human capital.
Chapter 3 traces the long-term development of human capital in Latin America since the 17th century to answer the question whether Latin America was really behind in terms of human capital as it is often stated. To answer this question it draws on an extensive database compiled from census material. It is the rst study that traces Latin American human capital development over such a long period. Data for Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru shows that the view of the Latin American region as a backward region in terms of economic indicators is far too limited and that the region had good possibilities to catch up in terms of basic education with today's developed countries.
After having outlined roughly the long-term development in numerical abilities in six impor-tant Latin American countries, chapter 4 focuses on one imporimpor-tant feature in Latin American educational development. While income and education inequality measures in Latin America for the second half of the 20th century reveal one of the highest inequalities worldwide, gender inequality in education is at a very low level in international comparison. For the rst half of
the 20th century and earlier, however, quantitative information did not exist until now. Klasen (1999) argues that gender inequality has a negative impact on economic development through two channels. The direct eect acts via the quality of human capital, and an indirect eect takes place through the channels of investment and fertility which are associated with more human capital formation. He also states that the eect of female education on economic grwoth may be underestimated due to the fact that women's activities are often not recorded in the national accounts. Applying the age heaping methodology separately for both sexes allows studying the development of gender inequality in 28 Latin American and Caribbean countries for the birth decades 1880 to 1940. The great number of countries studied in this paper clearly cannot scru-tinize education histories in all of these countries, but is intended to give a broad overview of general patterns in gender inequality in education.
Progress in education of a country can be hampered by internal problems like civil wars, a drop in education expenditure, or economic crises.Chapter 5 studies the impact of subsistence crises on human capital. It examines whether numeracy development was aected negatively by two subsistence crises in the 1840s and the 1850s. For this purpose, the paper studies the development of numeracy in 19th century Spain and uses grain prices as a proxy variable for the severity of the subsistence crises in the Spanish provinces. The results indicate that regions suering nutritional shortfalls tend to stagnate in terms of progress in numeracy levels. Even a short crises period of two years may lead to stagnation in the progress of education.
The next chapter applies another indicator of human capital to evaluate regional and social disparities in 19th century Peru. It analyzes in detail one source of age statements already used in Chapter 3 of the thesis, a data set of prisoners in Peru. Besides information on the age of these prisoners, information on human capital in the form of the biological standard of living is available. Their stature sheds light on their living conditions because adult heights result mainly from nutritional status and disease environment during childhood. The chapter studies the development of the biological standard of living of the middle and lower strata of the Peruvian society during the guano boom and traces regional and social disparities during this time.
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