Colonial legacy, state-building and the salience of ethnicity in Sub-Saharan Africa

Merima Ali, Odd Fjeldstad, Boqian Jiang and Abdulaziz Shifa ()

No 16, CMI Working Papers from CMI (Chr. Michelsen Institute), Bergen, Norway

Abstract: Ethnicity has received increased attention in studies of Africa's economic and institutional development. We present evidence on the long-term effects of Britain's "divide-and-rule" colonial strategy that deliberately fostered ethnic rivalries to weaken and control locals. Using micro data from Sub-Saharan Africa, we found that citizens of Anglophone (as compared to Francophone) countries are more likely to: (1) attach greater importance to ethnic identity (vis-a-vis national identity); (2) have weaker norms against tax evasion; and (3) face extortion by non state actors. We address endogeneity concerns using IV regression and regression-discontinuity. These results suggest that Britain's divide-and-rule strategy may have undermined state-building.

Keywords: Colonial legacy; development; ethnicity; state capacity; Sub-Saharan Africa; tax; tax evasion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-iue
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cmi.no/publications/file/5688-colonial ... and-the-salience.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Colonial Legacy, State-building and the Salience of Ethnicity in Sub-Saharan Africa (2019)
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:chm:wpaper:wp2015-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CMI Working Papers from CMI (Chr. Michelsen Institute), Bergen, Norway Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Robert Sjursen ().