Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education?

Abstract

Long-term growth in developing countries has been explained in four frameworks: ‘extractive colonial institutions’ (Acemoglu et al., 2001 Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S. and Robinson, J. A. 2001. The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation. American Economic Review, 91(5): 1369–1401. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), ‘colonial legal origin’ (La Porta et al., 2004 La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F., Pop-Eleches, C. and Shleifer, A. 2004. Judicial checks and balances. Journal of Political Economy, 112(2): 445–470. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), ‘geography’ (Gallup et al., 1998 Gallup, J. L., Sachs, J. D. and Mellinger, A. D. 1998. “Geography and economic development. NBER Working Paper 6849”. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. [Google Scholar]) and ‘colonial human capital’ (Glaeser et al., 2004 Glaeser, E. L., La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F. and Shleifer, A. 2004. Do institutions cause growth?. Journal of Economic Growth, 9(3): 271–303. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In this paper we test the ‘colonial human capital’ explanation for sub-Saharan Africa, controlling for legal origin and geography. Utilising data on colonial era education, we find that instrumented human capital explains long-term growth better, and shows greater stability over time, than instrumented measures for extractive institutions. We suggest that the impact of the disease environment on African long-term growth runs through a human capital channel rather than an extractive-institutions channel. The effect of education is robust to including variables capturing legal origin and geography, which have additional explanatory power.

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