Population Increase, Extralegal Appropriation, and the End of Colonialism

Herschel Grossman and Murat Iyigun

No 4488, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Between 1946 and 1976, the European powers granted independence to all of their large colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia. This paper attempts to provide an economic explanation for this remarkable ending to the era of colonialism. The main theoretical innovation is to consider the effect of population increase on the allocation of time by the indigenous population between productive and subversive activities. The analysis suggests that the increase in population during the colonial period increased the potential return to extralegal appropriation of the profits of colonial companies until the colonies became a net burden on the metropolitan governments. The analysis also suggests that there was less subversive activity in colonies in which the market for indigenous labor was monopsonized because monopsonistic employers internalized the potential negative effect of extralegal appropriation on net profits.

JEL-codes: F02 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Economica, Vol. 64 (August 1997): 483-493.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4488.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:4488

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4488

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().