Wars, Education and Economic Development

In this paper, we hypothesize that the prolonged wars in Latin America during most of the 19th century hindered human capital development and delayed economic progress well into the 20th century. Collecting novel data for the seven largest Latin American economies over the period 1820-2016, we show that the extraordinarily large share of military expenditure in total spending crowded out investment in education and R&D, which in turn had persistent effects on economic development.