Regional inequality in human capital formation in Europe, 1790–1880.

Recent theoretical advances reveal the importance of human capital for long-run economic growth. However, the absence of data makes it difficult to measure human capital before 1870 at the national level, let alone at the regional level within countries. By using the age heaping method and a large, new data set, we approximate the numeracy values in more than 570 regions in Europe between 1790 and 1880. The results indicate a significant gap in numeracy levels between advanced west and central European countries and the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, differences in basic numeracy between and within countries became smaller over the nineteenth century, as the periphery solved its basic numeracy problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]