Coffee tastes bitter: education and the coffee economy in Colombia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coffee became the main Colombian export, turning the country into one of the world’s leading coffee producers. This agrarian commodity provided resources for coffee-growing areas, favouring the rise of mass education. However, this paper suggests that coffee led to children ceasing to attend school to work in coffee production, thus affecting the demand for education adversely. We test this hypothesis by using different empirical strategies. We conduct panel regressions and instrumental variable cross-sectional estimates. The results show that increasing coffee production negatively affects the demand for the education of primary school-age children.