Family Income and Child Outcomes:The 1990 Cocoa Price Shock in Cote d'Ivoire

We study the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 Cote d'Ivoire and investigate the extent to which cocoa producers' children suffered from this severe income shock in terms of school enrollment, increased labor, height stature and sickness. Comparing pre-crisis (1986-1988) data and post-crisis (1993) data, we propose a difference-in-difference within-village strategy in order to identify the causal effect of family income on children outcomes. We find a strong impact of family income variation for the four variables we examine.

3 policy lessons from Africa’s colonial railways

One of the key questions facing international development organisations is: How to promote economic development in Africa? A considerable chunk of the World Bank’s recent lending centres on financing transportation infrastructure projects. Yet little is known about the economic impact of roads and railroad

Urbanisation with and without industrialisation

Despite established historical links between industrialisation and urbanisation, newer patterns of urbanisation, observed across much of the developing world, suggest that the drivers of urbanisation matter. Today’s blog looks at the difference between resource-led urbanisation and more the traditional form of industrialisation-led urbanisation that we associate with development

The skyscraper revolution: global economic development and land savings

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing economies would be at least one-third smaller on average without their tall buildings. Land saved from urban development by post-1975 tall building construction is over 80% covered in vegetation. To isolate the effects of technology-induced reductions in the cost of height from correlated demand shocks, we use interactions between static demand factors and the geography of bedrock as instruments for observed 1975-2015 tall building construction in 12,877 cities worldwide, a triple difference identification strategy. Quantification using a canonical urban model suggests that the technology to build tall generates a potential global welfare gain of 4.8%, of which only about one-quarter has been realized. Estimated welfare gains from relaxing existing height constraints are 5.9%in the developed world and 3.1% in developing economies

The value of democracy: evidence from road building in Kenya

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963–2011 period. Guided by a model it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism. Across the post-independence period, we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism: districts that share the ethnicity of the president receive twice as much expenditure on roads and have five times the length of paved roads built. This favoritism disappears during periods of democracy

Georeferenced Data of Christian Mission Stations, Ghana (1752-1932)

The data describes Christian mission stations established in Ghana 1752–1932. Data is reported at an annual basis. For all 2,144 mission stations, the data includes station name, denomination, circuity, longitude, latitude, year of entry, exit, whether the station is a main or out-station, and whether it had a school attached. For sub-periods the data also includes information on the number of church members, attendance and seat capacity. The data was mainly sourced from ecclesiastical returns provided by the mission societies and published in the British Blue Books of the Gold Coast 1844–1932. The source represents a comprehensive census of missions. Various other sources were consulted to extend the data base to Ghana's first mission (1752), to include missions from German Togoland incorporated into Ghana after World War I, and to account for years, for which no Blue Books have survived. Mission stations were then georeferenced based on the place name where the mission is located. Coordinates were retrieved from NGA place name gazetteer as well as other sources. The data can be used to study patterns in and effects of Christianization in Ghana. The geographic coordinates of the mission stations allow researchers to flexibly link the data to other spatio-temporal databases. The data has been used in: Jedwab, R., F. Meier zu Selhausen and A. Moradi (2021). Christianization without economic development: Evidence from missions in Ghana.'' Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 190: 573–596

Christianization without Economic Development: Evidence from Ghana

One of the most powerful cultural transformations of the 20th century has been the dramatic expansion of Christianity outside of Europe. This unique historical process was facilitated by vast Christian missionary efforts. In this paper, we study the economic effects of Christian missions in Ghana. We rely on six distinct identification strategies that exploit exogenous variations in Christian missionary expansion from 1828 to 1932. We find no association between Christian missions, whether Protestant, Catholic, Presbyterian or Methodist, and local economic development, whether during contemporary or colonial times. However, some results suggest that Christian missions might have had a positive effect on human capital formation. There might thus be contexts in which missions promoted human capital accumulation without this necessarily translating into local economic development

The Economics of Missionary Expansion:: Evidence from Africa and Implications for Development

How did Christianity expand in Africa to become the continent’s dominant religion? Using annual panel census data on Christian missions from 1751 to 1932 in Ghana, and pre-1924 data on missions for 43 sub-Saharan African countries, we estimate causal effects of malaria, railroads and cash crops on mission location. We find that missions were established in healthier, more accessible, and richer places before expanding to economically less developed places. We argue that the endogeneity of missionary expansion may have been underestimated, thus questioning the link between missions and economic development for Africa. We find the endogeneity problem exacerbated when mission data is sourced from Christian missionary atlases that disproportionately report a selection of prominent missions that were also established early

Historical Missionary Activity, Schooling, and the Reversal of Fortunes: Evidence from Nigeria

This paper shows that historical missionary activity has had a persistent effect on schooling outcomes, and contributed to a reversal of fortunes wherein historically richer ethnic groups are poorer today. Combining contemporary individual-level data with a newly constructed dataset on mission stations in Nigeria, we find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to greater missionary activity have higher levels of schooling. This effect is robust to omitted heterogeneity, ethnicity fixed effects, and reverse causation. We find inter-generational factors and the persistence of early advantages in educational infrastructure to be key channels through which the effect has persisted. Consistent with theory, the effect of missions on current schooling is larger for population subgroups that have historically suffered disadvantages in access to education

Revolutionizing transport: modern infrastructure, agriculture and development in Ghana

We study the impact of colonial investments in modern transportation in- frastructure on agriculture and development in Ghana. Two railway lines were built between 1901 and 1923 to connect the coast to mining areas and the large hinterland city of Kumasi. This unintendedly opened vast expanses of tropical forest to cocoa cultivation, allowing Ghana to become the world's largest producer. Using data at a very fine spatial level, we find a strong effect of railroad connectivity on cocoa production in 1927, generating rents in the order of 4.5% of GDP. We show that the economic boom in cocoa-producing areas was associated with demographic growth and urbanization. We find no effect for lines that were not built yet, and lines that were planned but never built. Lastly, railway construction had a persistent impact: railway districts are more developed today despite a complete displacement of rail by other means of transpor