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Measuring extractive institutions: colonial trade and price gaps in French Africa

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  • Federico Tadei

Abstract

Colonial extractive institutions are often blamed for current African underdevelopment. Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify, the magnitude of this phenomenon remains unclear. In this paper, I use new archival data to estimate colonial extraction through trade, measured as the gap between prices that the monopsonistic French trading companies paid to African producers and prices that should have been paid in a counterfactual competitive market. The results show that African prices were only a small fraction of competitive prices, implying an annual loss of almost 2 percent of GDP during colonial rule.

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  • Federico Tadei, 2020. "Measuring extractive institutions: colonial trade and price gaps in French Africa," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 24(1), pages 1-23.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ereveh:v:24:y:2020:i:1:p:1-23.
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ereh/hey027
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    Cited by:

    1. Federico Tadei, 2022. "Colonizer identity and trade in Africa: Were the British more favourable to free trade?," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 75(2), pages 561-578, May.
    2. Martina Cioni & Giovanni Federico & Michelangelo Vasta, 2021. "Spreading Clio: a quantitative analysis of the first 25 years of the European Review of Economic History [Plague in seventeenth-century Europe and the decline of Italy: an epidemiological hypothesi," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 25(4), pages 618-644.
    3. Aslanidis, Nektarios & Martínez Ibáñez, Oscar & Tadei, Federico, 2020. "The Integration of West Africa in the Global Economy, 1842-1938," Working Papers 2072/417678, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.

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