Did the Cold War Produce Development Clusters in Africa

Michel Le Breton, Paul Castañeda Dower, Gunes Gokmen and Шломо Вебер
Additional contact information
Michel Le Breton: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Paul Castañeda Dower: Unknown
Gunes Gokmen: Unknown
Шломо Вебер: Unknown

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We examine the lasting impact of Cold War alignment on African development. To overcome the empirical challenge of ambiguous and interdependent international alliances during the Cold War, we introduce a non-cooperative game of social interactions. Using pre-determined, country-level characteristics to construct payoffs, we identify a unique two-bloc equilibrium partition of the continent. We then assign bloc alignments based on how the partition predicts UN voting patterns. Our empirical results indicate no income differences today between the Western and the Eastern blocs. However, their development paths reflect Cold War ideologies: Western-aligned African countries have greater inequality, financial development, and democracy, but lesser infrastructure, compared to Eastern-aligned ones.

Keywords: Cold War; Political Alliances; Africa; Blocs; Development Clusters; Strong; Guerre froide; Alliances politiques; Afrique; Blocs; Pôles de développement; Nash Equilibrium; Landscape Theory.; Equilibre de Nash fort; Théorie du paysage. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-13
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05573607v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Development Economics, 2026, n° 103776, ⟨10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103776⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05573607v1/document (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:hal:journl:hal-05573607

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103776

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().