Beyond the chains: Slavery and Africa’s wealth gap with the world

No 2003, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Nelson Mandela University

Abstract: Slave trades represent one of the most controversial historical events experienced over the last millennium and many researchers are in consensus of the legacy of slavery being one of the deepest underlying factors behind Africa’s current state of underdevelopment. This study seeks to quantify the effects which slave exports exerted on per capita GDP differences between 49 Africa and the rest of the world during the period of 2000-2018. Our findings unanimously point to a statistically significantly inverse relationship between slave exports and income differences hence supporting the intuition of slavery being a fundamentally deep root of developmental differences between Africa and the rest of the world. Our results are robust to adjusted measures of slave exports; inclusion of additional control variables; colonial dummy effects well as to the exclusion of outliers.

Keywords: Slave exports; income gap; Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D63 I31 N17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2020-03, Revised 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-his
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Journal Article: Beyond the chains: Slavery and Africa's wealth gap with the world (2021)
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