Income Inequality in Colonial Africa: Building Social Tables for Pre-Independence Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, and Senegal
Guido Alfani and
Federico Tadei
No 594, Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University
Abstract:
Today, income inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa is exceptionally high. In this paper, we study whether present-day inequality can be traced back to the colonial period by reconstructing income distributions in a sample of representative colonies. To do so, we use data from colonial records to build new social tables for French colonies in West and Central Africa and we combine them with available information on British colonies in East and Southern Africa. We find that inequality in Africa is not a recent phenomenon. Income inequality was extremely high during the colonial period, in particular because of the huge income differential between Africans and European settlers. Nevertheless, it tended to reduce over time and the post-colonial period is characterized by much lower inequality. Interestingly, the decline of inequality is not necessarily a consequence of independence: the trends toward reduction started under colonial rule. JEL Classification: N17; O43 Keywords: Africa, Inequality, Income Distribution, Development, Extractive Institutions
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)
Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/wp/2017/594.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: INCOME INEQUALITY IN COLONIAL AFRICA: BUILDING SOCIAL TABLES FOR PRE-INDEPENDENCE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC, IVORY COAST AND SENEGAL (2017)
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:igi:igierp:594
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University via Rontgen, 1 - 20136 Milano (Italy).
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().