Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa's Past to its Current Underdevelopment

By Nathan Nunn. 2007

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent studies have found evidence linking Africa’s current underdevelopment to colonial rule and the slave trade. Given that these events ended long ago, why do they continue to matter today? I develop a model, exhibiting path dependence, that explains how these past events could have lasting impacts. The model has multiple equilibria: one equilibrium with secure property rights and a high level of production and others with insecure property rights and low levels of production. I show that external extraction, when severe enough, causes a society initially in the high production equilibrium to move to a low production equilibrium. Because of the stability of low production equilibria, the society remains trapped in this suboptimal equilibrium even after the period of external extraction ends. The model provides one explanation why Africa’s past events continue to matter today.

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Citations in the corpus

Well-Being Dynamics and Poverty Traps (2016, background): “…on phenomena such as ethnic fractionalization, weak property rights, public goods provision, and other institutions thought essential to promoting investment and development (Acemoglu et al. 2001, Banerjee & Iyer 2005, Dell 2010, Easterly & Levine 1997, Iyer 2010, Nunn 2007, 2009; Tan 2010).”
The ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis and the compression of history: Perspectives from African and comparative economic history (2008, background): “He assumes that ‘the coloniser’ choses ‘the rate of extraction’: the faction of ‘production that is expropriated’, and also decides the ‘amount of resources devoted towards enforcing the security of private property in the society’ (Nunn, 2007: 160).”
The Mission: Human Capital Transmission, Economic Persistence, and Culture in South America* (2018, methodology): “The geo(6)The e ect of Protestant missions has also been analyzed by Nunn (2010 and 2014) for the African case. (7)To do so, I employ country and state- xed e ects. (8)Indeed, Voltaire sent Candide to visit and aid the Jesuits of Paraguay, a praise also shared by Montaigne and Montesquieu. (9)Other ”