Research

Can name analysis be used to study elite persistence in African contexts? Taking Sierra Leone as a case study, we use surnames to measure how two historical elites (descendants of settlers that comprise Sierra Leone’s Krio community and members of Chiefly Ruling Houses) have fared over the postcolonial period. We find strong and persistent overrepresentation of these groups across a range of postcolonial elites, although decolonisation is associated with a marked decline in political elite persistence. The results also show strong elite compartmentalisation: Chiefly name-holders are more overrepresented in politics and mining, and their overrepresentation falls the more educationally-selective the profession. The Krio, conversely, are increasingly overrepresented the more educationally-selective the sector, and their role in politics diminished rapidly after independence. This speaks to the enduring legacy of the colony-protectorate divide in Sierra Leone, and to different strategies of elite perpetuation, whether through educational investments or political capital. It demonstrates that name-based methods can bring new perspectives to African elite studies. 

This paper sheds light on the fiscal trajectories of 18 former French colonies in Africa from colonial times to the present. Building upon own previous work about colonial public finance (Cogneau et al., 2021), we compile a novel dataset by combining previously available data with recently digitized data from historical archives, to produce continuous and comparable public revenue data series from 1900 to 2018. This allows us to study the evolution of the level and composition of fiscal revenues in the post-colonial decades, with a special focus on the critical juncture of independence. We find that very few countries achieved significant progress in fiscal capacity between the end of the colonial period and today, if we set aside income drawn from mineral resources. This is not explained by a lasting collapse of fiscal capacity at the time of independence. From 1960 to today, the reliance on mineral resource revenues increased on average and dependence on international commodity prices persisted, with few exceptions. The relative contribution of trade taxes declined after the structural adjustments, and lost trade revenues were not compensated by a sufficient increase in domestic taxes. However, for the most recent period, we do note an improvement in the capacity to collect taxes on the domestic economy. 

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Data and programs

To better understand how parental loss affects children's economic outcomes in the long run, and to better understand the human cost of the U.S. Civil War, we link Union Army records with U.S. Census data. This allows us to compare, when they are adults and participating in the labor market, the sons of soldiers who returned to the sons of those who died. We find that the sons who lost their father in childhood have a lower income and are less likely to have a skilled occupation, but this effect is absent for the sons of the wealthier soldiers, suggesting that family wealth offers some protection against the economic consequences of parental loss. 

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We revisit the question of colonial legacies in education by focusing on quality rather than quantity. We study Cameroon, a country where a Francophone education system with French colonial origins coexists with an Anglophone system with British colonial origins.  We use 2004-2005 representative school survey data and spatial discontinuity analysis at the border between former French and former British Cameroon to identify the causal effect of colonial origins on student test scores. We find that pupils schooled in the Francophone system perform better in mathematics in Grade 5, with test scores higher by more than half of a standard deviation. Though we cannot pin down the precise mechanisms behind this result, we find that Francophone schools have better classroom equipment and that Francophone teachers use more vertical teaching methods.

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Data and programs

We take advantage of a wave of school constructions in Cameroon after World War II and use variations in school supply at the village level to estimate labor and marriage market returns to education in the 1976 census. Education increases the likelihood to be in a polygamous union for men and for women, as well as the overall socioeconomic status of the spouse. We argue that education increases polygamy for women because it allows them to marry more educated and richer men, who are more likely to be polygamists. To show this, we estimate a structural model of marriage with polygamy. The positive affinity between a man's polygamy and a woman's education turns negative when we take the affinity of education into account.

Media coverage: AEHN blog

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Data and programs

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830–1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

Media coverage: Advantage Magazine, AEHN blog, The Conversation

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Data and programs

Cameroon was partitioned between France and the United Kingdom after WWI and then reunited after independence. I use this natural experiment to investigate colonial legacies in education, using a border discontinuity analysis of historical census microdata from 1976. I find that men born in the decades following partition had, all else equal, one more year of schooling if they were born in the British part. This positive British effect disappeared after 1950, as the French increased education expenditure, and because of favoritism in school supply towards the Francophone side after reunification. Using 2005 census microdata, I find that the British advantage resurfaced more recently: Cameroonians born after 1970 are more likely to finish high school, attend a university, and have a high-skilled occupation if they were born in the former British part. I explain this result by the legacy of high grade repetition rates in the French-speaking education system and their detrimental effect on dropout. 

Cet article effectue une revue sélective de travaux récents d’économistes étudiant l’impact des institutions historiques sur le développement économique en Afrique. Nous discutons d’abord quelques questions conceptuelles impliquées par la mesure des institutions, puis présentons les données rassemblées par l’anthropologue G. P. Murdock et leurs principales critiques. Plusieurs travaux mobilisent à nouveau ces données pour montrer que certaines institutions « ethniques » précoloniales constituent des déterminants fondamentaux des différences de développement contemporaines. Nous commentons ces travaux puis les comparons avec d’autres qui relativisent plutôt les différences institutionnelles héritées de la période coloniale. Nous défendons en conclusion que des comparaisons d’études de cas sont plus fructueuses que des études transversales reposant sur des variations mal contrôlées.

Why does it seem so difficult to build a sizeable developmental state in Africa? A growing literature looks at the colonial roots of differences in economic development, often using the French/British difference as a source of variation to identify which features of the colonial past mattered. We use historical archives to build a new dataset of public finances in 9 French and 4 British colonies of West Africa from 1900 to independence. Though we find some significant differences between French and British colonies, we conclude that overall patterns of public finances were similar in both empires. The most striking fact is the great increase in expenditure per capita in the last decades of colonization: it quadrupled between the end of World War II and independence. This increase in expenditure was made possible partly by an increase in customs revenue due to rising trade flows, but mostly by policy changes: net subsidies from colonizers to their colonies became positive, while, within the colonies, direct and indirect taxation rates increased. We conclude that the last fifteen years of colonization are a key period to understand colonial legacies.

In their paper “Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development” [Econometrica 81(1): 113-152], Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou claim that they document a strong relationship between pre-colonial political centralization and regional development, by combining Murdock’s ethnographic atlas (1967) with light density at night measures at the local level. We argue that their estimates do not properly take into account population effects. Among lowly populated areas, luminosity is dominated by noise, so that with linear specifications the coefficient of population density is biased downwards. We reveal that the identification of the effect of ethnic centralization very much relies on these areas. We implement a variety of models where the effect of population density is non-linear, and/or where the bounded or truncated nature of luminosity is taken into account. We conclude that the impact of ethnic-level political centralization on development is all contained in its long-term correlation with population density. We also abstract from the luminosity-population nexus by analyzing survey data for 33 countries. We show that individual-level outcomes like access to utilities, education, asset ownership etc. are not correlated with ethnic-level political centralization.