Editor's choice The Impact of the Slave Trade on Literacy in West Africa: Evidence from the Colonial Era

Nonso Obikili

Journal of African Economies, 2016, vol. 25, issue 1, 1-27

Abstract: Recent studies have highlighted the importance of Africa's history of slave exporting to its current economic development. In this article, I show that differences in investment in education may be one of the channels through which that history has affected current development. I combine data on literacy rates of administrative districts from the colonial censuses of Nigeria and Ghana from the 1950s with data on slave exports of different ethnic groups. I find a negative and significant relationship between slave export intensity before the colonial era and literacy rates during the colonial era. I also use contemporary data on literacy rates to show that this negative relationship is still present and significant. Thus, I show the effect of the slave trades on development outcomes predates modern independent African countries and still persists.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejv018 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:jafrec:v:25:y:2016:i:1:p:1-27.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().