Encomienda Indirectly Improved Modern Development

The encomienda, a brutal colonial forced-labor institution, is statistically tied to better development outcomes today across about 20 measures (GDP per capita, wages, health, education, infant mortality, literacy, and institutional capacity) in Colombia—not because forced labor itself helped, but because the presence of encomienda gave Spanish lords strong incentives to build durable local institutions to protect their property rights, and those local institutions persisted and grew in capacity within a chronically weak imperial state.