The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Stelios Michalopoulos, Louis Putterman and David Weil

No 11366, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Does a person’s historical lineage influence his or her current economic status? Motivated by a large literature in social sciences stressing the effect of an early transition to agriculture on current economic performance at the level of countries, we examine the relative contemporary status of individuals as a function of how much their ancestors relied on agriculture during the pre-industrial era. We focus on Africa, where by combining anthropological records of groups with individual-level survey data we can explore the effect of the historical lifeways of one’s forefathers. Within enumeration areas and occupational groups, we find that individuals from ethnicities that derived a larger share of subsistence from agriculture in the pre-colonial era are today more educated and wealthy. A tentative exploration of channels suggests that differences in attitudes and beliefs as well as differential treatment by others, including differential political power, may contribute to these divergent outcomes.

Keywords: Ethnicity; agriculture; Culture; Development; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J6 N37 N97 O15 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev, nep-evo, nep-ger, nep-his and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11366 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa (2019)
Working Paper: The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa (2016)
Working Paper: The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11366

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11366

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().