Land Conflicts, Property Rights, and the Rise of the Export Economy in Colombia, 1850–1925

The poor performance of the Colombian economy in the world markets during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are attributable, in part, to the weakness of settlers’ property rights in frontier lands. To examine this issue, we collected data on production of agricultural exports at county (municipal) level in 1892, coffee production in 1925, and of public land allocation and land conflicts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The quantitative analysis suggests that in the absence of land conflicts, the per capita production of agricultural exports would have been in 1925 at least twice as much as that observed.