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Journal of African Economies Advance Access published online on April 22, 2009
Journal of African Economies, doi:10.1093/jae/ejp009
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© The author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Root Causes of African Underdevelopment

Sambit Bhattacharyya*

Arndt-Corden Division of Economics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

* Corresponding author: Arndt-Corden Division of Economics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, HC Coombs Building, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Telephone: +61 2 6125 2681. Fax: +61 2 6125 0443. E-mail: sambit.bhattacharyya{at}anu.edu.au. URL: http://rspas.anu.edu.au/~sambit/

What are the root causes of Africa's current state of under-development? Is it the long history of slave trade, the legacy of extractive colonial institutions, or the fallout of malaria? We investigate the relative contributions of these factors using Atlantic distance, Indian Ocean distance, Saharan distance, Red Sea distance, log settler mortality and malaria ecology as instruments. The results show that malaria matters the most and all other factors are statistically insignificant. Malaria also negatively affects savings. The results are robust even when the malaria ecology instrument is replaced by frost, humidity and rainfall and when the latter are used as additional control variables. We find that frost alone is enough to knock off the effects of slave trade and institutions on long-term development in Africa.

JEL classification: O11, O41, O57, N0


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