Color in the Tropics: Race and Economic Outcomes in the Island of Puerto Rico By Francisco Rivera-Batiz Professor of Economics and Education Teachers College, Columbia University 525 West 120th Street New York, NY 10027
[email protected] and Visiting Scholar Russell Sage Foundation 112 East 64th Street New York, NY 10021 Francisco @rsage.org May 2004 (Revised, March 2005) The author is grateful to the research assistance of Alejandro Falchettore and to the comments of participants at the conference, “Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the Mainland United States: New Directions in Social Science Research, held at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York on May 21-22, 2004, the conference on “Race and Gender in the Caribbean,” sponsored by the Center for Advanced Caribbean Studies, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 31, 2005, and at a seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 0 1. Introduction The impact of race on economic outcomes is a topic that has received enormous attention among labor economists over the years. In the United States, hundreds of studies have examined the divergent economic opportunities on the basis of race and the mechanisms through which race affects earnings, employment, etc. [see the surveys by Cain (1986) and Altonji and Blank (1999)]. Similarly, there is a growing body of work on the connections between race and economic outcomes in Latin America, including research on Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, and many others [Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (1994), Lovell and Wood (1998), Lam (1999), Patrinos (2000), Florez and Medina (2001), and Oakley (2002)]. By contrast, there has been very little analysis of how race and racial discrimination affect income and labor market performance in the Caribbean.