to the top of the ranking by 1940, and the opposite is true for those that were leaders in educational outcomes in the early years.

To understand this puzzle it is important to notice that Brazil had a peculiar institutional setting. During the imperial period, political institutions were largely elitist, and public spending on education was concentrated in the capital of the country. Yet the rapid change brought by the Republican revolution led to, among other changes, a new Constitution that decentralised taxation and expenditures on public education. This allowed states to generate their own revenues from export and internal taxes without the introduction of any compensatory mechanisms for the more disadvantaged states. The new Constitution also introduced direct elections for governors, the upper and lower chambers, and theHuman Capital and Institutions: The Long Run View, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press: 93–142.

Frankema, Ewout (2012), “The Origins of Formal Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Was British Rule More Benign?”, European Review of Economic History, 16(4): 335–355.

Gallego, Francisco (2010), “Historical Origins of Schooling: The Role of Democracy and Political Decentralization”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(2): 228–243.

Musacchio Aldo, Andre Martinez and Martina Viarengo (2014), “Colonial Institutions, Commodity Booms, and the Diffusion of Elementary Education in Brazil, 1889–1930”, NBER Working Paper 20029, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic History.