Impact of Colonial Institutions on Economic Growth and Development in India: Evidence from Night Lights Data

Priyaranjan Jha and Karan Talathi ()
Additional contact information
Karan Talathi: Department of Economics, University of California-Irvine

No 202102, Working Papers from University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the implications of two historical institutions, direct British rule, and the heterogeneous land tenure institutions implemented by the British, on disparity in present day development using district level data from India. Using nightlights per c apita as a proxy for district level per capita income, we find that modern districts that were historically under direct British rule had 39.47% less nightlights per capita in 1993 relative to modern districts that were historically under indirect British rule. The large gap persists even after including other controls such as educational attainment, health, and physical infrastructure. Looking at the growth pattern during 1993 to 2013, directly ruled districts had a 1.84% lower annual growth rate compared to indirectly ruled districts. As well, directly ruled districts were converging at a rate of 2% per year while indirectly ruled districts were converging at a rate of 5.7% per year. Much of the development gap between areas under indirect rule and direct rule can be accounted for by the adverse effect of landlord-based revenue collection system in the directly ruled areas.

Keywords: Institutions; Direct British Rule; Economic Growth; Nightlights per Capita; Land Tenure System; Economic Development; Human Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O43 P16 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.ed ... ts_India_JT_2021.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.edu/dist/3/809/files/2021/04/Nightlights_India_JT_2021.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/404.html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Impact of Colonial Institutions on Economic Growth and Development in India: Evidence from Night Lights Data (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:irv:wpaper:202102

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melissa Valdez ().