Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13367.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 2007 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13367
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Find related papers by JEL classification: F1 - International Economics - - Trade F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration N0 - Economic History - - General O1 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
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