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Pre-colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development

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  • Stelios Michalopoulos
  • Elias Papaioannou

Abstract

We investigate the role of deeply-rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differences in local geographic features or by other observable ethnic-specific cultural and economic variables. The strong positive association between pre-colonial political complexity and contemporary development obtains also within pairs of adjacent ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre-colonial political institutions.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 18224.

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Date of creation: Jul 2012
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18224

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Cited by:
  1. Fenske, James, 2010. "Ecology, trade and states in pre-colonial Africa," MPRA Paper 27203, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  2. Fenske, James, 2012. "African polygamy: Past and present," MPRA Paper 41618, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  3. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay & Elliott Green, 2012. "Pre-Colonial Political Centralization and Contemporary Development in Uganda," STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series 039, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
  4. James Fenske & Namrata Kala, 2012. "Climate, ecosystem resilience and the slave trade," CSAE Working Paper Series 2012-23, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.

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