Did the Cold War Produce Development Clusters in Africa?

Paul Castañeda Dower, Gunes Gokmen, Michel Le Breton () and Shlomo Weber
Additional contact information
Paul Castañeda Dower: University of Wisconsin-Madison
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
Shlomo Weber: New Economic School, - New Economic School

Working Papers from HAL

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: Landscape Theory; Africa; Political Alliances; Cold War; Blocs; Strong Nash Equilibrium; Development Clusters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11-12
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05361152v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05361152v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Did the Cold War Produce Development Clusters in Africa? (2022)
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:hal:wpaper:hal-05361152

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().