Impact of technological progress on carbon emissions in different country income groups
This study examines the complex relationship between carbon emissions and technological progress in a sample of 60 countries, divided into four categories based on their per capita income between the periods of 1989-2018. For robustness purposes and due to the broad definition of technology, we use six different proxies to represent technology; namely: Information and […]
Health inequality and the 1918 Influenza in South Africa
The 1918 influenza – the Spanish flu – killed an estimated 6% of South Africans. Not all were equally affected. Mortality rates were particularly high in districts with a large share of black and coloured residents. To investigate why this happened, we transcribed 39,482 death certificates from the Cape Province. Using a novel indicator – […]
Trade Openness and Fertility Rates in Africa: Panel Data Evidence
We study the effect of trade openness on fertility rates in fifty African countries during the1962 – 2010 period. By disaggregating the trade openness data in novel ways, and allowing for country and time fixed effects, our results indicate that trade openness and imports of manufactured goods are significantly related to lower fertility. Furthermore, trade […]
Black living standards in South Africa before democracy: New evidence from heights
Very little income or wage data was systematically recorded on the living standards of South Africa’s black majority during much of the twentieth century. Between 1911 and 1996, for example, only fragmentary evidence of black living standards remain in mining reports and manufacturing censuses, often at a too generalised level or of too short time-span […]
Intergenerational mobility during industrial take-off
Using a novel dataset of genealogical records, we make the first attempt to measure the social mobility of white South Africans during this revolutionary period in the country’s economic history. We investigate both absolute and relative social mobility. To do this we employed several methods, in the aim of providing a comprehensive account of intergenerational […]
Why local context matters: de jure and de facto property rights in colonial South Africa
For economic transactions, including debt transactions, to occur in a market system, property rights are essential. The literature has focussed on finding empirical proof of the effect of property right regimes, noting differences between de jure and de facto property rights. Yet most of these studies focus on macroeconomic outcomes, like economic growth and public […]
Social mobility during South Africa’s industrial take-off
In the absence of historical income or education data, the change in occupations over time can be used as a measure of social mobility. This paper investigates intergenerational occupational mobility using a novel genealogical dataset for settler South Africa, spanning its transition from an agricultural to an early industrialized society (1800–1909). We identify fathers and […]
User Fee Abolition in South Africa: 1994 and 1996
In addition to birthing a new Democracy, 1994 was the beginning of a number of changes for health care delivery in South Africa. Officially, on June 1, 1994, public health care user fees were abolished for a wide swath of the population. As long as young children (those under six years of age), elderly adults […]
When selection trumps persistence: The lasting effect of missionary education in South Africa
To estimate the long-term, persistent effects of missionary education requires two strong assumptions: that mission station settlement is uncorrelated with other economic variables, such as soil quality and access to markets, and 2) that selection into (and out of) mission stations is unimportant. Both these assumptions are usually not sufficiently addressed, which renders the interpretation […]
Father’s Employment and Sons’ Stature: The Long Running Effects of a Positive Regional Employment Shock in South Africa’s Mining Industry
I exploit the unexpected increase in employment in 1975, 76 and 77 in the South African homelands to compare the long term adult outcomes of children whose fathers benefitted from the employment increase to those who did not. Using a standard difference in difference approach I find that the shock affected males who were either […]
The missing people: Accounting for indigenous populations in Cape Colonial history
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups is often missing from colonial records, their presence usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely […]
Slave Prices and Productivity in the 18th Century at the Cape of Good Hope: The Winners and Losers from the Trade
The question about the productivity of slavery is a strongly debated issue, for example in the USA the seminal work by Engerman and Fogel (1974), “Time on the Cross”, sparked a flurry of publications debating the issue from different angles. The debate about the economic worth of slaves in the Cape of Good Hope already […]
Social Capital and Human Capital in the Colonies: A Study of Cocoa Farmers in Western Nigeria
I examine the relationship between social and human capital in colonial Western Nigeria. Using data on expenditure of cocoa farmers in 1952, I show that farmers in townships with higher social spending individually spend more on education. The relationship holds after controlling for various characteristics of the farmers and the townships. Thus I show that […]
The Impact of the Slave Trade on Literacy in Africa: Evidence from the Colonial Era
Recent studies have highlighted the importance of Africa’s history of slave exporting to its current economic development. In this paper I show that differences in investment in education may be one of the channels through which that history has affected current development. I combine data on literacy rates of administrative districts from the colonial censuses […]
A country of migrants: Advances in South African economic history
South Africa is a country of migrants. From the Bantu migration, the arrival of Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century and British settlers in the nineteenth century to the internal movement of black tribes after the Mfecane, the Great Trek of settler farmers, and the inflow of African workers to the mines, South African history […]
Heights and development in a Cash-Crop Colony: Living standards in Ghana, 1870-1980
While Ghana is a classic case of economic growth in an agricultural‐export colony, scholars have queried whether it was sustained, and how far its benefits were widely distributed, socially and regionally. Using height as a measure of human well‐being we explore the evolution of living standards and regional inequality in Ghana from 1870 to 1980. […]
Slave numeracy in the Cape Colony and comparative development in the eighteenth century
The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrain investigations into the long-run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in regions such as Africa. Using the reported age of criminals in the Courts of Justice records in the Cape Archive, this paper documents, for the first time, the levels of and […]
The wealth of the Cape Colony: Measurements from probate inventories
The stylized view of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress in the first 143 years of Dutch rule. New evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records show that previous estimates about wealth at the Cape are inaccurate. In contrast to earlier historical accounts, the inventories reveal […]
Settler skills and colonial development
The emphasis on location-specific factors, such as climate or disease environment, in the explanation of development outcomes in colonial societies implicitly assumes that settler groups were homogenous. Using tax records, this paper shows that the French Huguenots who immigrated to Dutch South Africa at the end of the 17th century were more productive wine-makers than […]
A history with evidence: Income inequality in the Dutch Cape Colony
The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would seemingly become an extremely unequal society, with ramifications into modern-day South Africa. In this paper, we measure the income inequality at three different points over the first century of Dutch rule at the Cape. What emerges from the study […]
The dynamics of inequality in a newly settled, preindustrial society: The case of the Cape Colony
Inequality is a major concern in many of the world’s developing regions. South Africa is no exception, as the voluminous literature on the subject attests to (see Bhorat and Kanbur 2006, for example). Indeed, modern South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world, primarily as a result of institutionalised inequality under […]
Ship traffic and the economy of the Cape Colony: 1652-1793
Most historians regard the Cape Colony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an impoverished and destitute settlement, primarily because of the many restrictions and prohibitions enforced by the Dutch East India Company, who founded the Cape settlement as a refreshment station for its ships. The mercantilist thinking of the time ensured that the free […]
Slavery and economic history research in South Africa – An ERSA Research Workshop
The fourth ERSA Economic History Workshop in November will focus on African colonial history with an emphasis on the issue of African slavery. It will also provide us with an opportunity to finalize details about papers for a possible publication on the incorporation of ‘new economic history’ and its techniques and questions to the Southern […]
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