Pre-Colonial Political Centralization and Contemporary Development in Uganda

Abstract

The role of pre-colonial history on contemporary development has become an important field of study within development economics. Here we examine the role of pre-colonial political centralization on contemporary development outcomes with detailed sub-national data from Uganda. We use a variety of datasets and obtain two striking results. First, we find that pre-colonial centralization is highly correlated with modern-day development outcomes such as GDP, asset ownership and poverty at the sub-county, district and individual level; additional results using an instrumental variable approach confirm this finding. Second, we find that public goods such as immunization coverage and primary school enrollment, as well as perceptions of local government quality, are not correlated with pre-colonial centralization. These findings are thus consistent with a correlation between pre-colonial centralization and private rather than public goods, thereby suggesting the persistence of poverty and wealth from the pre-colonial period to the present.