Did the Cold War Produce Development Clusters in Africa?

Michel Le Breton, Shlomo Weber, Paul Castañeda Dower and Gunes Gokmen

No 21-1228, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: This paper examines the lasting impact of the alignment of African countries during the Cold War on their modern economic development. We find that the division of the continent into two blocs (East/West) led to two clusters of development outcomes that reflect the Cold War’s ideological divide. To determine alignment, we introduce a non-cooperative game of social interactions where each country chooses one of the two existing blocs based on its predetermined bilateral similarities with other members of the bloc. We show the existence of a strong Nash equilibrium in our game and apply the celebrated MaxCut method to identify such a partition. The alignment predicts UN General Assembly voting patterns during the Cold War but not after. Our approach, linking global political interdependence to distinct development paths in Africa, relies on history to extract a micro-founded treatment assignment, while allowing for an endogenous, process-oriented view of historical events.

Keywords: Cold War; Political Alliances; Africa; Blocs; Development Clusters; Strong Nash Equilibrium; Landscape Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C62 C72 F54 F55 N47 O19 O57 Y10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-06-22, Revised 2022-01-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/docu ... 2021/wp_tse_1228.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Did the Cold War Produce Development Clusters in Africa? (2021)
Working Paper: Did the Cold War Produce Development Clusters in Africa? (2021)
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:tse:wpaper:125756

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().