3.3 Markets and History-Dependence
I now move on to other pathways for history-dependence, beginning with the central role of inequality. According to this view, historic inequalities persist (or widen) because each individual entity — dynasty, region, country — is swept along in a self-perpetuating path of occupational choice, income, consumption, and accumulation. The relatively poor may be limited in their ability to invest productively, both in themselves and in their children.
Such investments might include either physical projects such as starting a business, or “human projects” such as nutrition, health and education. Or the poor may have ideas that they cannot profitably implement, because implementation requires startup funds that they do not have. Yet, faced with a different level of initial inequality, or jolted by a one-time redistribution, the very same economy may perform very differently. Now investment opportunities are available widely through the population, and a new outcome emerges with not just lower inequality, but higher aggregate income. These are different steady states, and they could well be driven by distant histories (see, e.g., Dasgupta and Ray (1986), Banerjee and Newman (1993), Galor and Zeira (1993), Ljungqvist (1993), Ray and Streufert (1993), Piketty (1997) or Matsuyama (2000)).
The intelligent layperson would be unimpressed by the originality of this argument. That the past systematically preys on the present is hardly rocket science. Yet theories based on convergence would rule such obvious arguments out. Under convergence, the very fact that the poor have limited capital relative to labor allows them to grow faster and (ultimately) to catch up. Economists are so used to the convergence mechanism that they sometimes do not appreciate just how unintuitive it is.
That said, it is time now to cross-examine our intelligent layperson. For instance, if all individuals have access to a well-functioning capital market, they should be able to make an efficient economic choice with no heed to their starting position, and the shadows cast by past inequalities must disappear (or at least dramatically shrink). For past wealth to alter current investments, imperfections in capital or insurance markets must play a central role.
At the same time, such imperfections aren’t sufficient: the concavity of investment returns would still guarantee convergence. A first response is that such “production functions” are simply not concave. A variety of investment activities have substantial fixed costs: business startups, nutritional or health investments, educational choices, migration decisions, crop adoptions. Indeed, it is hard to see how the presence of such nonconvexities could not be salient for the ultra poor. Coupled with missing capital markets, it is easy to see that steady state traps, in which poverty breeds poverty, are a natural outcome (se, e.g., Majumdar and Mitra (1982), Galor and Zeira (1993)). Surveys of the econonomic conditions of the poor (Banerjee and Duflo (2007), Fields (1980)) are eminently consistent with this point of view.
A related source of nonconvexity arises from limited liability. A highly indebted economic agent may have little incentive to invest. Similarly, poor agents may enter into contracts with explicit or implicit lower bounds on liability. These bounds can create poverty traps (Mookherjee and Ray (2002a)).
Investment activities that go past these minimal thresholds are potentially open to “convexification”. There are various stopping points for human capital acquisition, and a household can hold financial assets which are, in the end, scaled-down claims on other businesses. Under this point of view, dynasties that make it past the ultrapoor thresholds will exhibit ergodic behavior (as in Loury (1981) and Becker and Tomes (1986)) and so the prediction is roughly that of a two-class society: the ultrapoor caught in a poverty trap and the remainder enjoying the benefits of convergence. History would matter in determining the steady-state proportions of the ultrapoor.
But this sort of analysis ignores the endogenous nonconvexities brought about by the price system. For instance, even if there are many different education levels, the wage payoff to such level will generally be determined by the market. There is good reason to argue (see, e.g., Ljungqvist (1993), Freeman (1996) and Mookherjee and Ray (2002b, 2003)) that the price system will sort individuals into different occupational choices, and that there will be persistent inequality across dynasties located at each of these occupational slots. Thus an augmented theory of history dependence might predict a particular proportion of the ultrapoor trapped by physical nonconvexities (low nutrition, ill-health, debt, lack of access to primary education), as well as a persistently unequal dispersion of dynasties across different occupational choices, induced by the pecuniary externalities of relative prices.
Note that it is precisely the high-inequality, high-poverty steady states that are correlated with low average incomes for society as a whole, and it is certainly possible to build a view of underdevelopment from this basic premise. The argument can be bolstered by consideration of economy-wide externalities; for instance, in physical and human capital (Romer (1986), Lucas (1988), Azariadis and Drazen (1990)).