Pre-colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development

By Stelios Michalopoulos, Elias Papaioannou. Econometrica, 2012

1,042 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa9f61fe4c0124229373b3a439cfc91ee968af02

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Citations in the corpus

The Standard Errors of Persistence (2019, neutral): “A dummy is included in Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013) for areas within 200 kilometers of the coast, and for Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) indicators were added for the three main cities of western Nigeria.”
State Capacity and Long-Run Economic Performance (2016, neutral): “Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013) show a significant positive impact of pre-colonial political centralization on current economic development in Africa. increased the national government’s capacity to extract greater tax revenues: a country like France, for example, could extract nine times more…”
Does Non-farm Income Affect Food Security? Evidence from India (2019, background): “Night-lights are considered to be an excellent proxy of economic activity, even at the local level at which economic output figures are hardly available (Donaldson & Storeygard, 2016; Henderson, Storeygard, & Weil, 2012; Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2013).”
Institutions, Resources, and Organizational Effectiveness in Africa (2015, background): “Although tribalism and nepotism sometimes undermine collective performance, efficiency, and productivity, they tend to be used extensively in rural areas because of patrimonial demands (Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2013).”
Long Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China’s Civil Examination System (2020, neutral): “[61] Michalopoulos, Stelios, and Elias Papaioannou.”
Fast and wild: Bootstrap inference in Stata using boottest (2018, background): “Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013) (MP) investigated the effect of pre-colonial ethnic institutions on comparative regional development in African countries.”
States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints☆ (2017, background): “…is particularly widespread and intractable in countries that lack a history of centralized government (Herbst, 2000; Gennaioli and Rainer, 2007; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2013) and are internally fragmented (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2014); and countries with weak state capacity are…”
The Economic Origins of Conflict in Africa (2017, neutral): “See Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013) for a discussion on the particular suitability of nighttime lights as measure for economic development in Africa.”
The long Term Effects of the Printing Press in Sub Saharan Africa (2016, background): “John Philip to the missionary Robert Moffat who transported it from Port Elizabeth to Kuruman in 1831 (Moran, 1973). As it appears on the picture, printing presses were bulky at the time. It is difficult to have exact information of the size of each given press, but some useful information is given ”
The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa (2019, methodology): “5See Henderson et al. (2012); Bleakley & Lin (2012); Michalopoulos & Papaioannou (2013, 2018); Lowe (2014) on night lights as a proxy for average incomes.”