The economic impact of Italian colonial investments in Libya and in the Horn of Africa, 1920-2000

This dissertation examines the micro-level effects of Italian colonial investments in Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, and sheds light on both their short and long-term impact. It focuses on two flagship projects, launched by the dictator Benito Mussolini during the 1930s, namely the construction of a modern road network in the Horn of Africa and the settlement of Italian farmers in Libya. The contributions are twofold. First, this thesis focuses on types of colonial investment that have not been studied before, while looking at a group of colonies that have previously been neglected by the cliometrics revolution in African economic history. Thus, it enhances our understanding of the effect of colonialism in general and, on Africa, in particular. Second, by exploiting a set of quasi-natural experiments from the history of Italian colonialism to explore the micro-effect of specific policies, this thesis also contributes to the economic geography and development literatures that have looked at the determinants of agglomeration and productivity in developing countries. It is structured around three substantive chapters. The first one studies the effect of Italian road construction in the Horn of Africa on economic development and shows how locations that enjoyed a first-mover advantage in transportation thanks to the Italian road network are significantly wealthier today. The second substantive chapter assesses the effect of Italian agricultural settlement on indigenous agriculture in Libya at the end of the colonial period and pinpoints an adverse effect of Italian presence on Libyan productivity. Finally, the third substantive chapter studies the effect of the expulsion of Italian farmers from Libya after World War II and finds a reduction in agricultural commercialization in affected districts following the shock

The long-term impact of the Italian colonial expenditures in the Horn of Africa

A growing body of literature analyses the relationship between colonialism and long-term development, but largely overlooks the effect of colonial public investments on transportation infrastructure, schooling and sanitary facilities. In my research, I exploit the case study of Italian colonial investments in the Horn of Africa between 1934 and 1941, to unveil the relationship between such investments and present-day inequalities in terms of level of development and living standards and to explore the mechanisms that explain the persistence of colonial investments over time. I create three geo-referenced (a grid dataset and two individual) datasets by matching historical data on colonial investments, collected from both archival and printed primary sources, with micro-level open-source contemporary data for development and modern surveys for living standards to perform OLS and probit regression analysis. Firstly, I regress proxies for level of development, such as population density and light density at night, on dummies for being within 20km from colonial roads. Secondly, I regress measures of living standards, such as female literacy, BMI and children holding a sanitary card, on binary variables for living less than 10km away from a colonial schools and hospitals. Several robustness checks are performed to address the possible endogenous placement of colonial facilities including IV estimation, placebo treatment and nearest neighbour score matching. The data show a strong, positive and statistically significant relationship between proximity to colonial roads and economic development, on the one hand, and proximity to schooling, sanitary facilities and living standards, on the other. This demonstrates that areas endowed with more generous investments from the colonial period perform better in terms of economic development and living standards at present. The analysis also points out that the effect persisted mainly through phenomena of path-dependency and re-location.This thesis is not currently available via ORA