The long memory of poverty: the Historical Unsatisfied Basic Needs and the geographic patterns of standards of living in Argentina (and Spain) in the last 100 years

Abstract

Regional inequality in living standards is a major social problem in the very top of most of the political agendas worldwide. However, their origins and ultimate causes are far from clear. In this paper we propose a new strategy to measure living standards in the long run based on the Unsatisfied Basic Needs approach (the Historical UBN – HUBN). Using data on education and housing from census and Statistical Yearbooks from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century we present a description of population’s standards of living in Argentina and Spain (with some notes to Uruguay) with an unprecedented high level of spatial disaggregation. The first finding of this paper is that the correlation among the different dimension of our HUBN and between the HUBN and other contemporaneous variables linked with standards of living (like average incomes or inequality) are usually the expected ones suggesting that the HUBN is capturing relatively well some dimension of poverty levels. The second finding of the paper is that the geographic distribution of the standards of living one hundred years ago is remarkably similar to the one dominant nowadays. This very high levels of persistence suggests that regional inequality of standards of living is extremely resilient to policy interventions and reinforces the hypotheses related with geographic determinants and/or strong levels of path dependence.