Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880-1965
CGEH Working Paper No. 24
55 Pages Posted: 25 Jan 2012
Date Written: December 10, 2011
Abstract
Recent studies on African economic history have emphasized the structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions and extractive colonial institutions. The evidence is mainly drawn from cross-country regressions on late 20th century income levels, assuming persistent effects of historical causes over time. But to which extent has African poverty been a persistent phenomenon? Our study sheds light on this question by providing new evidence on long-term African growth-trajectories. We show that slave trade regressions are not robust for pre-1970s GDP per capita levels, or for pre-1973 and post-1995 growth rates. We calculate urban unskilled real wages of African workers in nine British African countries 1880-1965, adopting Allen’s (2009) subsistence basket methodology. We find that real wages were above subsistence level, rose significantly over time and were, in major parts of British Africa, considerably higher than real wages in Asian cities up to, at least the 1930s. We explain the intra-African variation in real wage levels by varying colonial institutions concerning land alienation, taxation and immigration.
Keywords: Africa, living standards, real wages, labor market, colonial institutions
JEL Classification: I30, N17, N27, N37, O10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades
By Nathan Nunn
-
Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa
By Nathan Nunn and Diego Puga
-
Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa
By Nathan Nunn and Diego Puga
-
The Modern Impact of Precolonial Centralization in Africa
By Nicola Gennaioli and Ilia Rainer
-
The Importance of History for Economic Development
By Nathan Nunn
-
Economic and Political Inequality in Development: The Case of Cundinamarca, Colombia
By Daron Acemoglu, M B, ...
-
Economic and Political Inequality in Development: The Case of Cundinamarca, Colombia
By Daron Acemoglu, M B, ...
-
By Daron Acemoglu and Martin Kaae Jensen
-
Inequality and Redistribution: Evidence from U.S. Counties and States, 1890-1930
-
The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita
By Melissa Dell