Pre-Colonial Political Centralization and Contemporary Development In
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Working Paper No. 141 PRE-COLONIAL POLITICAL CENTRALIZATION AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENT IN UGANDA by Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay and Elliott Green AFROBAROMETER WORKING PAPERS Working Paper No. 141 PRE-COLONIAL POLITICAL CENTRALIZATION AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENT IN UGANDA by Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay and Elliott Green November 2012 Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is Lecturer in Economics, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London. Email: [email protected] Elliott Green is Lecturer in Development Studies, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. Email: [email protected] Copyright Afrobarometer i AFROBAROMETER WORKING PAPERS Editor Michael Bratton Editorial Board E. Gyimah-Boadi Carolyn Logan Robert Mattes Leonard Wantchekon Afrobarometer publications report the results of national sample surveys on the attitudes of citizens in selected African countries towards democracy, markets, civil society, and other aspects of development. The Afrobarometer is a collaborative enterprise of the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD, Ghana), the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), and the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy (IREEP) with support from Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Cape Town, Center of Social Science Research (UCT/CSSR). Afrobarometer papers are simultaneously co-published by these partner institutions and the Globalbarometer. Working Papers and Briefings Papers can be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat format from www.afrobarometer.org. Idasa co-published with: Copyright Afrobarometer ii ABSTRACT The effects of pre-colonial history on contemporary African development have become an important field of study within development economics in recent years. In particular (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007) suggest that pre-colonial political centralization has had a positive impact on contemporary levels of development within Africa at the country level. We test the (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007) hypothesis at the sub-national level for the first time with evidence from Uganda. Using a variety of datasets we obtain results which are striking in two ways. First, we confirm the (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007) hypothesis that pre-colonial centralization is highly correlated with modern-day development outcomes such as GDP, asset ownership and poverty levels, and that these correlations hold at the district, sub-county and individual levels. We also use an instrumental variable approach to confirm this finding using the distance from ancient capital of Mubende as an instrument. However, our second finding is that public goods like immunization coverage and primary school enrollment are not correlated with pre-colonial centralization. These findings are thus consistent with a correlation between pre-colonial centralization and private rather than public goods, thereby suggesting the persistence of poverty and wealth from the pre-colonial period to the present. iii INTRODUCTION1 The long-term effects of history on contemporary economic development have become an important field of study within development economics in recent years (cf. Nunn (2009) for an overview). While the impact of colonialism on post-colonial outcomes has long been a focus for scholars, a smaller but growing field of study has developed, linking pre-colonial formations with post-colonial developments in former colonies (Englebert, 2000; Green, 2012; Hjort, 2010; Jha, 2008). In one recent example of this trend, Gennaioli and Rainer (2007) suggest that pre-colonial political centralization has had an impact on contemporary levels of development within Africa. Measuring pre-colonial centralization by using data from Murdock (1967), they show a robust positive correlation between the percentage of each country's population that is from a centralized ethnic group and outcomes such as paved roads, immunization, literacy and infant mortality rates. The analysis presented by (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007) is provocative and adds to a growing literature on the importance of history for contemporary African development. Their analysis, however, cannot be considered definitive for at least three reasons. First, their unit of observation is the country level, leaving them with between 24 and 45 observations per regression. Despite their efforts at providing a variety of robustness checks there are nonetheless numerous ways in which such a small sample can produce unreliable results. Second, as they acknowledge (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007, p. 192), if the effect of pre-colonial centralization on contemporary development is to have an effect, it should primarily exist at the sub-national level rather than the national level as differences within countries are reflected within localities. Finally, the analysis is open to the potential criticism of omitted variable bias and reverse causality, especially if pre-colonial economic development may have contributed both to the development of pre-colonial centralized states and to contemporary development outcomes. We therefore test the Gennaioli and Rainer (2007) hypothesis at the sub-national level in a single country for the first time. We use the example of Uganda, a map of which can be found in Figure 1, for several reasons. First, Gennaioli and Rainer (2007, pp. 188-191) themselves consider Uganda an ideal case study because it demonstrates large variance in historical centralization across different parts of the country, leading them to use it as their primary qualitative example. Second, due to decentralization policies that began after the current government took office in 1986, local governments have played a large role in local public goods provision, thereby allowing us to test Gennaioli and Rainer (2007)’s proposed mechanism that centralization has affected development outcomes via local government legitimacy. Third, due to the availability of development data at the district and sub-county level, we are able to use much larger samples than were employed by Gennaioli and Rainer (2007), with 56 to 76 observations at the district level and 958 at the sub- county level. Fourth, due to the fact that Uganda is one of twenty countries in Africa to have been surveyed by the Afrobarometer in its most recent round of surveys in 2008, we can also employ survey data which contains information on assets, public goods, ethnicity and a variety of control variables. Fifth, unlike most African censuses which fail to record any data on ethnicity2, the most recent Ugandan census from 2002 contains data on ethnicity disaggregated down to the level of the sub-county, thereby allowing us to construct a detailed picture of pre-colonial centralization. Finally, the focus on a single country allows us to identify an instrument for pre-colonial centralization which can thereby help to clarify the direction of causality. 1We would like to thank Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz for sharing data with us and Cecilia Lanata Briones for research assistance. All errors remain our own. Elliot Green is the corresponding author. 2Morning (2008) finds that only 44% of African countries ask questions about ethnicity on their censuses, tied with Europe for the lowest proportion among all regions in the world. Some countries like Tanzania have not asked questions about ethnicity since the 1960s. 1 Figure 1: Map of Uganda 2 Our results are striking in two ways. First, using a variety of dependent variables, we confirm the Gennaioli and Rainer (2007) hypothesis that pre-colonial centralization is highly correlated with modern-day development outcomes at the district, sub-county, and individual levels. These results are robust to the use of various control variables and clustered standard errors; we also use distance from the ancient capital of Mubende as an instrument and find that most of our results are stronger. Our second finding, however, is that a number of dependent variables are not correlated with pre-colonial centralization, specifically those that measure public goods provision, like immunization and access to hospitals, police, and other public services. Moreover, using Afrobarometer results, we find that there is no relationship between local levels of pre- colonial centralization and the quality of public services. These findings are thus consistent with a correlation between pre-colonial centralization and private rather than public goods, suggesting the persistence of poverty and wealth from the pre-colonial period to the present. The paper is organized as follows. First, we give an overview of the theory and empirics behind Gennaioli and Rainer (2007) before describing our data, including how we ascribed different levels of pre-colonial complexity to each of Uganda's 55 ethnic groups. Second, we present our empirical analysis, using data at the district, sub-county and individual levels as well as the use of an instrumental variable. Third, we show how our results differ according to private versus public goods. Fourth and finally, we conclude. THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL OVERVIEW There is a growing emphasis within development economics on the effects of history in determining contemporary development outcomes. Much of this recent work owes to the seminal influence of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001), who argue that the quality of colonial institutions are an important determinant of economic development across the post-colonial world. While much of this work has examined the legacies of colonialism, a small but growing literature has discussed the role of the pre-colonial