Essays on socio-political factors and economic development

Abstract

Contemporary development outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa vary not only between, but also within countries. These differences today cannot be fully understood without taking ethnicity, and the interrelated effect of ethnic-specific and colonial institutions into account. In this thesis, we study the effect of these socio-political factors on important sub-national development outcomes such as access to public goods, education and women political participation.

In Chapter 2 of the thesis, we examine whether coethnicity with the president affects public infrastructure provision in South Africa. Using municipal-level data for 52 district municipalities from 1996 to 2016, we find that municipalities coethnic to the president are associated with higher water and electricity infrastructure provision relative to non-coethnic municipalities. By controlling for variables that proxy for institutions and taking election periods and term limits into consideration, we show that our findings are not driven by political motives. The findings of ethnic favouritism also remain robust to different specifications of coethnicity thresholds and lag structures. The research contributes to the debate on redistributive politics in Africa.

In Chapter 3, we show that present-day education outcomes in Africa cannot be independently attributed to colonial or pre-colonial ethnic institutions. It is instead the complementarity or contention between these two institutions that result in education outcomes we observe today. Using geolocated Demographic and Health Surveys' (DHS) literacy outcomes for Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria, we find that British rule is positively associated with literacy in fragmented ethnic regions. The positive effect of British rule, that is often reported in the literature, is mitigated in centralised ethnic regions where British rule was more indirect, potentially opposed and less salient relative to ethnic-specific institutions. This paper contributes to debates on colonial and pre-colonial ethnic influences on development, moving beyond country-level analysis.

In Chapter 4, we study whether present-day contemporary women political participation in sub-Saharan Africa can be linked to the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades and the consequent gender ratio imbalances, in the context of pre-existing gender norms determined by kinship structures. Using geolocated individual-level data for 28 sub-Saharan African countries from the latest Afrobarometer surveys, and ethnic region kinship and slave trade data, we find that a woman's ethnic region exposure to the transatlantic slave trade is associated with an increase in her likelihood to vote, however, only in non-patrilineal societies. This effect is mitigated in patrilineal societies, where women likely have less decision-making power based on lineage. We contribute to the literature on the contemporary sub-national effects of the slave trades and the historical causes of gender gaps in political participation.