Six decades after independence: the enduring influence of missionary activities on regional wealth inequalities in Ghana

Godfred O Boateng, Dozie Okoye, Jonathan Amoyaw and Isaac Luginaah

Journal of Economic Geography, 2020, vol. 20, issue 1, 93-122

Abstract: What forces drive regional economic divergence? This study identifies colonial-era missions as an institutional force in shaping economic relations in Ghana. We conceptualize Christian missions as an institution, in its solid form, as the educational infrastructure and trade networks developed, and in its formal form, as advancing new rules that governed cultural and trade development. We use survey data, a map of mission stations, data on colonial-era urbanization and calculations of geographic endowments in each region of the country to examine the impacts of missionary activities on wealth, schooling and population clustering, and how these are reflected in wealth differences across regions of Ghana today. Results show that regional disparities in household wealth are large and significantly associated with intensity of colonial missionary activities, even after accounting for other important structural factors.

Keywords: Ghana; missionary activity; regional inequality; wealth; population clusters; spatial disparities; agglomeration; north–south divide (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F J (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeg/lby067 (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:jecgeo:v:20:y:2020:i:1:p:93-122.

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

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Geography is currently edited by Jorge De la Roca, Stephen Gibbons, Simona Iammarino, Amanda Ross and James Faulconbridge

More articles in Journal of Economic Geography from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().