The lands surrounding the historical homeland borders in Africa are notoriously linked to conflict and underdevelopment. With half of Africa currently living within 30 km of a homeland border, the borderlands are...
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JEL Code: O1
Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth → Economic Development
I study the impacts of exposure to one of Africa’s largest circular migration flows using an arbitrary border within Mozambique that, from 1893 to 1942, separated areas where young men were either...
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Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extra- judicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are used primarily as...
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Political institutions and the balance of political power strongly influence the evolution of economic institutions, making them important for economic growth. The nature of political institutions and the distribution of political power...
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Do infrastructure investments have the potential to transform Africa’s economic geography? Today, Africa suffers a massive infrastructure deficit (Calderón and Servén 2010). The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa has fewer than...
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Belief in witchcraft, broadly defined as the ability to use supernatural techniques to harm others or acquire wealth, is a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon which still represents a salient feature of daily life...
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This essay presents an economic history perspective on prospects for industrialization in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Gerschenkron-Amsden ‘late development’/‘late industrialization’ approach has valuable insights for Africa, but is best set within Sugihara’s longer-term,...
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Given difficult to access pre-colonial forms of surplus extraction, African colonial governments faced severe constraints to raise revenue for incipient colonial state formation. This paper compares the ways in which the British...
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While Ghana is a classic case of economic growth in an agricultural-export colony, scholars have queried whether it was sustained, and how far its benefits were widely distributed, socially and regionally. Using...
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