Among the world’s most powerful cultural transformations in modern history has been the rapid expansion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. While Christians made up barely 5% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population in 1900,...
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Africans on the global migration scene: past and present African migration figures prominently in global headlines, and often not in a positive light. The massacre in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in...
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Economist John Williamson coined the term “Washington Consensus” in 1989, in reference to a set of 10 market-oriented policies that were popular among Washington-based policy institutions, as policy prescriptions for improving economic...
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Linking fertility decline to financial inclusion Kenya experienced a steep decline in fertility from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s. Fertility reduction then stalled in the mid-1990s coinciding with a reduction in...
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Research on African economic performance has often focused on the question of why Africa has underperformed other regions. The only available data on Africa’s long-run economic performance began in 1950, and showed...
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South Africa’s development path is often regarded as unusual in both global and regional context, although scholars disagree on when and why it diverged. Some have argued that South Africa’s exceptionalism was...
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State capacity is important for economic development, but the economic history of state building is understudied and until recently, it disproportionately represented Western Europe and Western offshoots. In recent years, new research...
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The impact of colonialism on economic development has been a popular object of study across the social sciences. At the macro- and micro-level, scholars have linked colonial history to a variety of...
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Much research in economic history has demonstrated that precolonial institutions continue to influence contemporary African development. In a pioneering study, Michalopoulos & Papaioannou (2013) have argued that areas with centralized pre-colonial institutions...
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There has been renewed interest in the long-term effects of colonial-era Christian missionary activities on African economies today. Most of this work focuses on the long-run effects of missionary activities on...
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