Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Luminosity (whether a pixel is lit at night) is a good proxy measure for local economic development across Africa.
“Following a series of recent papers, we consider this measure to be a good proxy measure for local economic development across Africa.”
From Legal Origins and Female HIV (2018) · cites this paper as Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2013)
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- Authors
- Michalopoulos, S., & Papaioannou, E.
- Affiliations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (US)
- Dartmouth College (US)
- Venue
- Econometrica
- Publisher
- The Econometric Society
- Published
- 2013
- Volume
- 81
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 113-152
- ISSN
- 0012-9682 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4118452
- OpenAlex
- W3022599120
- Cited by
- 953
- References
- 38
- Citations by year
- 2026: 38 · 2025: 66 · 2024: 75 · 2023: 73 · 2022: 80 · 2021: 93 · 2020: 97 · 2019: 81 · 2018: 88 · 2017: 59 · 2016: 71 · 2015: 54 · 2014: 47 · 2013: 22 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 176.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Econometrica (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD041020)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Demography › Culture, Economy, and Development Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Economic Growth and Development
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Historical Economic and Social Studies
- Keywords
- regional development, economic performance, political complexity, ethnic homelands, institutional legacy, Africa
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