In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the economic divergence across Flemish localities between 1830 and 1910 is explained by the theory of Hernando de Soto. We hypothesize that the uniform land rights installed after the French revolution provided borrowers with an attractive form of collateral. Conditional on the presence of local financial development provided by a new government-owned bank this eased access to external finance and fostered industrial and commercial economic activity. Using primary historical data of about 1179 localities in Flanders, we find that the variation in the local value of land (collateral) and the variation in local financial development jointly explain a substantial amount of the variation in non-agricultural employment accumulated between 1830 and 1910. By 1910, industrial and commercial economic activity was more developed in localities where both early (1846) rural land prices were high and early (1880) local financial development was more pronounced, which is in line with the ‘de Soto’ hypothesis.

在本文中，我们研究了Hernando de Soto理论解释1830至1910年间弗拉芒地区经济差异的假设。我们假设法国大革命后建立的统一土地权为借款人提供了一种有吸引力的抵押形式。依靠新的国有银行提供的当地金融发展，这可以简化获得外部金融的渠道并促进工商业经济活动。利用法兰德斯地区约1179个地方的主要历史数据，我们发现土地（抵押品）当地价值的变化和地方金融发展的变化共同解释了1830年至1910年间积累的大量非农业就业的变化到1910年，