History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa

By É. Huillery. 2009

331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To what extent do colonial public investments continue to influence current regional inequalities in French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database and the spatial discontinuities of colonial investment policy, this paper gives evidence that early colonial investments had large and persistent effects on current outcomes. The nature of investments also matters. Current educational outcomes have been more specifically determined by colonial investments in education rather than health and infrastructures, and vice versa. I show that a major channel for this historical dependency is a strong persistence of investments; regions that got more at the early colonial times continued to get more.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ddc5fbe1bcb7b1db387c89f54331c8bfe74c738

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

In Economics and Econometrics

In Information Systems

Citations in the corpus

The erosion of colonial trade linkages after independence (2010, background): “Huillery (2009) shows that uneven colonial investment partly explains current income inequalities within former FrenchWest Africa.”
The long Term Effects of the Printing Press in Sub Saharan Africa (2016, background): “New approaches of this question include micro-oriented studies isolating specific channels through which a development dynamic was durably established (see for instance Nunn (2008) on slave trade, Huillery (2009) on colonial investments, Dell (2010) on forced mining-labor, Alesina, Easterly, and Mat”
The Impact of Weather Anomalies on Migration in sub-Saharan Africa (2012, background): “We could also assume that the fact to have experienc d a similar colonial experiences is what matters because it will capture many similarities due to comm n colonial heritage (Acemoglu et al., 2001; La Porta et al., 1999; Huillery, 2009).”
The Mission: Human Capital Transmission, Economic Persistence, and Culture in South America* (2018, background): “This piece relates more speci cally to the literature on the long-term impact of colonialism and colonial investments (Feyrer and Sacerdote, 2009; Huillery, 2009; Dell 2010; Bruhn and Gallego 2012; Becker et al. 2014; Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya 2014; Jedwab et al. 2014).”
Education and Human Capital Externalities: Evidence from Colonial Benin (2015, result): “Duflo 2004, Weir and Knight 2004, Kimenyi et al. 2006) finds that wage and output premiums as well as development are likely caused by increased human capital. The evidence from this paper supports this claim by showing sizable effects on income, occupational choice, and development in the African c”