The Long Shadow of the Past: Political Economy of Regional Inequality in Colombia

The main empirical fact is that regional inequality has been highly persistent despite the large changes that have taken place and the modernization of the society. We show that regional inequality is highly correlated with signicant within-country dierences in economic and political institutions, which are themselves highly persistent over the same period. We propose a tentative political economy theory of why the spatial distribution of institutions and economic outcomes has been so persistent over time.