784 research outputs found
The Legacies of Slavery in and out of Africa
The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences on contemporaneous socio-economic outcomes, drawing from my own previous work on the topic and from an extensive review of the available literature. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the \u201csending\u201d countries in Africa, with attention to their economic, institutional, demographic, and social implications. Next I evaluate the consequences of the slave trade on the \u201creceiving\u201d countries in the Americas. Here I distinguish between the case of Latin America and that of the United States. Overall, I show that the slave trades exert a lasting impact along several contemporaneous socioeconomic dimensions and across diverse areas of the worl
Growth, Colonization, and Institutional Development. In and Out of Africa
This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a
broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also
for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from standard growth
regressions, I analyze the role of Africa’s peculiar history, which has been marked by its colonization
experience. Next I discuss the potential growth impact of state fragility, a concept which reflects
multiple facets of the dysfunctions that plague the continent. The last topic I address is the influence, in
and out of Africa, of the slave trades. The essay ends with critical conclusions and suggestions for
further research
Women, medieval commerce, and the education gender gap
We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in
Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country’s
Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database
including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-
1901 period. We find robust evidence that female primary school
attainment, relative to that of males, is positively associated with the
medieval pattern of commerce, along the routes that connected Italian
cities among themselves and with the rest of the world. The effect of
medieval commerce is particularly strong at the non-compulsory upperprimary level and persists even after controlling for alternative long-term
determinants reflecting the geographic, economic, political, and cultural
differentiation of medieval Italy. The long-term influence of medieval
commerce quickly dissipates after national compulsory primary
schooling is imposed at Unification, suggesting that the channel of
transmission was the larger provision of education for girls in
commercial centers
The Fragile Definition of State Fragility
We investigates the link between fragility and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa over a
yearly panel including 28 countries for the 1999-2004 period. Beside the conventional definition of
fragility adopted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, we introduce the more severe
definition of extreme fragility. We show that only the latter exerts a significantly negative impact on
economic development, once standard economic, demographic, and institutional regressors are
accounted for. As a by-product of this investigation we produce up-to-date evidence on the growth
performance of the area. We find a tendency to convergence and no influence of geographic and
historical factors
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