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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JEL Code: O
Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth
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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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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In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many mechanisms, sometimes encouraging development sometimes retarding...
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