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Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education? Evidence from a New Data Set

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Author Info
Bolt, Jutta
Bezemer, Dirk
Abstract

Long-term growth in developing countries has been explained in four frameworks: ‘extractive colonial institutions’ (Acemoglu et al., 2001), ‘colonial legal origin’ (La Porta et al., 2004) ‘geography’ (Gallup et al., 1998) and ‘colonial human capital’ (Glaeser et al., 2004). In this paper we test the ‘colonial human capital’ explanation for sub-Saharan Africa, controlling for legal origins and geography. Utilizing freshly collected data on colonial-era population density and education, we find that in sub-Saharan Africa, high European population mortality did not lead to low European population densities, contra Acemoglu et al., (2001). Further, we find that instrumented human capital explains long-term growth better, and shows greater stability over time, than instrumented measures for extractive institutions. We therefore suggest that the impact of the disease environment on African long-term growth runs through a human capital channel rather than an extractive-institutions channel. The effect of education is robust to including variables capturing legal origin and geography, which have additional explanatory power. We also find some evidence that institutions are endogenous to education.

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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 7029.

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Date of creation: Feb 2008
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:7029

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Related research
Keywords: Africa; growth; institutions; education; colonial history;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
O11 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
O10 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General
P51 - Economic Systems - - Comparative Economic Systems - - - Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems
P16 - Economic Systems - - Capitalist Systems - - - Political Economy of Capitalism

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Nathan Nunn, 2009. "The Importance of History for Economic Development," NBER Working Papers 14899, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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