Thursday, December 02, 2010

Impact of Slavery on Slave Exporting Nations

It's well established that most poor nations are located in Africa. Here's one possible explanation:
Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.

3 comments:

  1. By negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance do mean that more the number of people exported better it is developed now ??

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  2. No. It's saying the higher the number of slaves taken, the lower the economic performance.

    In the same way that immigration is good for an economy, kidnapping people is bad.

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  3. Ok..thanks of clarifying.

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