Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development

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.

Nighttime lights as a proxy for human development at the local level

“…Thereby, nighttime lights have helped to improve our understanding of comparative development [13, 14, 17, 18] as well as a host of other topics ranging from favoritism [9, 16] to ethnic inequality [15] and micro-finance [11]. …”

Resources and Governance in Sierra Leone’s Civil War

“…This is consistent with the interpretation of Fearon and Laitin (2003) that state capabilities are at the heart of many crises of violence. It also naturally links the literature on grievances and conflict to the literature on the quality of governance as determined by precolonial factors (for example, Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2013), experiences during the colonial era (Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2001;Mamdani, 1996) or postcolonial reconstruction efforts (see Casey, Glennerster, & Miguel, 2012;King & Samii, 2014).…”

Historical Ethnic Homelands and Income Convergence in Africa

“…To further strengthen our argument on the suitability of per capita CO2 emissions to proxy for local development on the ethnic homeland level within the African continent, we next calculate unconditional corCopyright c 2014 University of Perugia Electronic Press. All rights reserved relations between calculated CO2 emissions in 1880 and pre-colonial ethnic specific characteristics per African ethnic group obtained from Murdock's (1967) Ethnographic map (as reported in Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2013). We report those correlations in Table 3.…”