Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades?To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades.I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance.To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables.Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.
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