Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson — Did the Europeans Bring Human Capital To the Americas??

Overall, settler colonies did not start out with favorable human capital endowments. In fact these were most probably higher in Latin America.

By the middle of the 19th century, North America and Australia were far ahead of Latin America in terms of educational attainment and human capital. But this was a consequence of political decisions to allocate resources to education and the incentives their institutions created to acquire human capital.

Read it at Why Nations Fail
Did the Europeans Bring Human Capital?
by Daron Acemoglu, Killian Professor of Economics at MIT, and James Robinson, David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University