Jutta Bolt
Senior lecturer
Understanding Long‐Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education
Author
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