Essays on Intergenerational Mobility in Africa

Abstract

This thesis seeks to provide an in-depth examination of intergenerational mobility in Africa. Examining intergenerational mobility and its underpinnings is of particular importance for Africa which, by 2020, was home to 8 of the 10 most unequal countries globally. We focus on the role of different historical institutional aspects in understanding and explaining trends and patterns in intergenerational mobility within selected African countries. The different institutions and relationships that we examine are (i) colonial administrative institutions and their implication for parental versus ethnic group based persistence (ii) precolonial ethnic group class systems and historical persistence (iii) political systems and human capital accumulation across different stages of development.

The thesis is comprised of six chapters. The first chapter provides a general introduction to the thesis. In the second chapter paper, we provide insight on how colonial administrative institutions and policies may have affected the evolution of intergenerational mobility in different parts of Africa through their effect on ethnicity. We focus on former British and French colonies and compare differences in intergenerational education persistence from parents to children to ethnic group based persistence. We use cross sectional secondary data for eight countries and apply both linear regression and interaction modelling regression techniques. Our results show high levels of parental and ethnic based persistence. We also find that persistence from parents to children is stronger in former French colonies while parental ethnic group-based persistence is stronger in former British colonies. Nevertheless, our birth cohort results show that the importance of ethnicity in the intergenerational mobility process has declined in former British colonies, while remaining comparatively static in former French colonies.

Precolonial characteristics such as ethnic group centralization and agricultural practices have been found to be relevant in explaining different aspects of economic development for Africa. In the third chapter, we explore whether intergenerational transmission of education within African countries also depends on precolonial and early colonial period ethnic group characteristics. In particular, we set out to examine whether differences in class stratification systems that existed within ethnic groups from that era are relevant for explaining social mobility. Estimates from an interaction linear regression model, using cross-sectional household survey data for six African countries, reveals differences in intergenerational persistence based on the historical class stratification system in which the various ethnic groups fall into. We find statistically significant differences in intergenerational persistence in three of the six countries. The findings from this paper challenges the notion of uniformity in institutional lock in and support arguments that national level estimates mask significant differences in mobility between groups within the country.

The fourth chapter of this thesis examines taxes and intergenerational transmission of human capital when households are faced with a savings threshold that determines the ability to invest in children’s education. We study human capital accumulation across different stages of economic development and show that rich households are more likely to invest in children’s education than poor households at all stages. We find that the tax rate preferred by the poor is higher than that of the rich households and an application of the median voter theorem suggests that democratic settings may be a mode of accelerating social mobility and movements to higher stages of development through increased redistribution and public investment in education in the early stages. This then increases aggregate human capital and productivity in the economy, leading to a transition to a higher stage of development.

Chapter 5 provides policy implications that arise from the thesis while Chapter 6 concludes by providing a summary of the dissertation and suggesting future areas of research.