Pre-colonial Religious Institutions and Development: Evidence through a Military Coup

Adeel Malik and Rinchan Ali Mirza

No 2018-04, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: This paper offers a novel illustration of the political economy of religion and development by empirically examining the impact of religious shrines on development. Compiling a unique database covering the universe of holy Muslim shrines across Pakistani Punjab, we show that historically embedded religious power shapes persistent differences in literacy. Using the 1977 military take-over as a universal shock, our difference-in-differences analysis suggests that areas with a greater concentration of shrines recognized by the British colonial administration experienced a substantially retarded growth in literacy. We argue that this literacy disadvantage in shrine-dominated regions is largely attributable to a growingly prominent role of shrine elites in electoral politics and their direct control over allocation of public goods since the 1977 military coup. Our analysis suggests that shrines in these regions represent the confluence of three forces—religion, land and politics —that together constitute a powerful structural inequality with potentially adverse consequences for development.

JEL-codes: I25 N55 O15 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8756e48d-a6f9-4ce2-b8d0-ace92615d9cf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:csa:wpaper:2018-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().