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Jutta Bolt . Photo

Jutta Bolt

Senior lecturer

Jutta Bolt . Photo

Understanding Long‐Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education

Author

  • Jutta Bolt
  • Dirk Bezemer

Summary, in English

Long-term growth in developing countries has been explained in four frameworks: ‘extractive colonial institutions’ (Acemoglu et al., 2001), ‘colonial legal origin’ (La Porta et al., 2004), ‘geography’ (Gallup et al., 1998) and ‘colonial human capital’ (Glaeser et al., 2004). In this paper we test the ‘colonial human capital’ explanation for sub-Saharan Africa, controlling for legal origin and geography. Utilising data on colonial era education, we find that instrumented human capital explains long-term growth better, and shows greater stability over time, than instrumented measures for extractive institutions. We suggest that the impact of the disease environment on African long-term growth runs through a human capital channel rather than an extractive-institutions channel. The effect of education is robust to including variables capturing legal origin and geography, which have additional explanatory power.

Publishing year

2009

Language

English

Pages

24-24

Publication/Series

Journal of Development Studies

Volume

45

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Economic History

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0022-0388