Экономический рост, колонизация и институциональное развитие: в Африке и за её пределами

Discussion Paper Series

Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (Institute for the Study of Labor)
IZA DP No. 5856
July 2011
Graziella Bertocchi

Growth, Colonization, and Institutional Development: In and Out of Africa

Graziella Bertocchi
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, CEPR, CHILD and IZA

Discussion Paper No. 5856
July 2011

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ABSTRACT

Growth, Colonization, and Institutional Development: In and Out of Africa*

This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from standard growth regressions, I analyze the role of Africa’s peculiar history, which has been marked by its colonization experience. Next I discuss the potential growth impact of state fragility, a concept which reflects multiple facets of the dysfunctions that plague the continent. The last topic I address is the influence, in and out of Africa, of the slave trades. The essay ends with critical conclusions and suggestions for further research.

JEL Classification: O43, N17, H11
Keywords: growth, Africa, history, colonization, institutions, state fragility, slavery

Corresponding author:
Graziella Bertocchi
Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Dipartimento di Economia Politica
Viale Berengario 51
41100 Modena
Italy
E-mail: graziella.bertocchi@unimore.it

* I would like to thank Olivier de la Grandville and Arcangelo Dimico for helpful comments and suggestions. Generous financial support from Fondazione Cassa Risparmio di Modena is gratefully acknowledged.

1. Introduction

One of the most challenging questions for modern growth theory is why Africa has been underperforming for the entire post-war period, and probably even before, if compared with the rest of the world. This fact remains true even though, following a long sequence of disastrous decades, the economic conditions of some African countries have shown a rapid improvement since the mid-1990s (Sala-i-Martin et al., 2010; Young, 2010).

There is a growing literature which has tried to document and understand the African experience. An initial research line has attempted to compare Africa, as a whole, with the rest of the world. For a cross section of countries, Barro (1991) shows that a dummy for sub-Saharan Africa exerts a significant and negative effect on the average growth of per-capita GDP for the 1960-1985 period, after controlling for a broad set of growth correlates. In the same vein, some progress towards a deeper understanding of the area’s specific problems is made by Easterly and Levine (1997), who highlight the potential role of ethnic diversity, by Schmidt-Hebbel (1996), who focuses on fiscal policies, and by Sachs and Warner (1997), who emphasize the impact of geography.

One limit of the continent dummy approach is that it can only assess how Africa as a whole, or its sub-Saharan portion, differ from the rest of the world, thus obscuring important heterogeneities within the continent itself. Thus, a parallel line has attempted instead to emphasize specific cross-country differences within African samples. The purpose of this essay is to illustrate the main results so far reached within this stream of the literature. Rather than at a complete survey, my goal is to offer a reconstruction of the path followed by this largely empirical exploration and of its main turning points.

Moreover, I explain how research on the empirics of growth in Africa is inspired by a broader agenda which has focused on the links among growth, history, and institutions.

The essay is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly describes the general research agenda on growth, history, and institutions. Section 3 investigates the role of standard determinants of Africa’s specific growth performances. Section 4 focuses on those historical factors that are particularly important for Africa, being determined by the history of the continent’s colonization. Section 5 introduces the latest addition to the never ending list of candidate growth correlates, the concept of state fragility, and reviews its potential impact. Section 6 addresses the long term influence on development, in and out of Africa, of the slave trades. Section 7 derives critical conclusions and indicates directions for further research.

2. Growth, history, and institutions

The present investigation on the determinants of growth in Africa is an ideal application of a broader research agenda which has developed in recent years around the combination of three main ingredients: the economics of growth, the theory of institutions, and their interrelationship with history.

The revival of growth theory during the 1980s, building on Solow’s (1956) seminal contribution, is where this research line finds its deepest roots. Romer (1986) and Lucas (1988) are the first to adapt the Solowian model by embedding endogenous technical progress and human capital, with the goal of comprehending the post-war persistence of cross-country differences in growth performances.

At the same time, the field of development economics, by then largely merged with macroeconomic dynamics, has come to recognize the crucial role of history in shaping a country’s destiny. Extended data collection, as a joint effort of economists, economic historians and historians (Maddison, 2007), has broadened the time horizon for empirical investigations over a longer and longer time span, thus allowing researchers to answer old questions and also to raise new ones. On the modeling front, an influential literature has investigated the determinants of growth over the long run, in order to find a unified explanation of very different phases of the history of human development, going back to the Malthusian era and even beyond (Galor, 2011).

At the same time, extending the relevant time horizon backward has allowed economists to recognize an increasing role for institutional factors, besides purely economic ones. Indeed the historical and institutional dimensions complement each other, since the economic impact of institutions tends to manifest itself more clearly in the long run. Building on the earlier intuition by North (1981), a broad set of institutions has entered the research agenda. Just to name a few contributors, Engerman and Sokoloff (1997) highlight the links among factor endowments, institutions, and differential growth paths. La Porta et al. (1998) start a research line on the effects of legal institutions on various outcomes. Barro (1999) extends the growth regressions approach to the study of the links between growth and democracy. Acemoglu et al. (2004) point to institutions as the fundamental cause of long run growth.

As explained in Bertocchi (2006), the case of Africa is especially promising as an application of the research line that combines growth, history and institutions, since the colonial institutions established in Africa mainly during the nineteenth century are likely to have shaped, directly and indirectly, the development of the area. Fenske (2011) provides a review essay on the role of institutions in African history and development and argues that even crucial growth factors such as geography, ethnic fractionalization and colonial history operate largely through institutions. Nunn (2009) also provides a survey of the line of research on history and development, with a special focus on colonial rule as a unifying theme.