Pre-colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development

Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

No 18224, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We investigate the role of deeply-rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differences in local geographic features or by other observable ethnic-specific cultural and economic variables. The strong positive association between pre-colonial political complexity and contemporary development obtains also within pairs of adjacent ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre-colonial political institutions.

JEL-codes: N17 O4 O43 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-his
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Published as Stelios Michalopoulos & Elias Papaioannou, 2013. "PreâColonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(1), pages 113-152, 01.

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Journal Article: Pre‐Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development (2013)
Working Paper: Pre-colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development (2012)
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