A simple data set on post-colonial growth trajectories in the African continent, for intended use to instruct students about t-tests around the application of colonial legacies.
Format
A data frame with 53 observations on the following 11 variables.
ccodea Correlates of War state code
cw_namea Correlates of War state name
styearthe start year for latest system entry for the state
IndFroma Correlates of War state code, if applicable, identifying the state from which the state identified in the
ccodegained independencecolmasta character vector largely corresponding with the information in
IndFromwith only slight changesmrgdppcindan estimate of GDP per capita for the year identified in the
styearcolumn, itself largely corresponding with independence from the state identified inIndFromandcolmastmrgdppc5an estimate of GDP per capita 5 years from the year identified in the
styearcolumnmrgdppc10an estimate of GDP per capita 10 years from the year identified in the
styearcolumnmrgdppc15an estimate of GDP per capita 15 years from the year identified in the
styearcolumnmrgdppc20an estimate of GDP per capita 20 years from the year identified in the
styearcolumnmrgdppc25an estimate of GDP per capita 25 years from the year identified in the
styearcolumn
Details
Data are generated with assistance from isard, another R package I maintain.
Data are sliced to record only latest system entry into the CoW data, which concerns states (like Morocco, Tunisia, and Ethiopia) that were temporarily occupied and eliminated.
I take some liberties classifying former colonial masters in the colmast
column. Namely, I elect to not record Ethiopia's independence from Italy as
suggesting Italy was a colonial master of Ethiopia. I do not code South
Africa's independence from the United Kingdom as noteworthy for the sake of
this analysis (given the topic of interest to me for creating these data).
Senegal nominally gains independence from Mali when it leaves the Mali
Federation, but I attributes its independence to being ultimately from France.
Morocco and Tunisia were protectorates of France though the ICOW measure of
colonial history says it gains independence from the Ottoman Empire. I do not
consider Namibia (South Africa) or Eritrea (Ethiopia) to be colonial under the
states from which they gained independence.
The estimates of GDP per capita are real GDP per capita in prices constant
across countries and over time (in 2011 international dollars, PPP). These
data are sourced from the Maddison project database but are the product of
simulations by Farris et al. (2022). You can read a bit more about these
in the sources in the reference section, or in the documentation for the
cw_gdppop data frame in the isard package.
Colonial history data come by way of ICOW (v. 1.1).
References
Bolt, Jutta, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Luiten Janvan Zanden. 2018. "Rebasing 'Maddison': New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development." Maddison Project Working paper 10.
Fariss, Christopher, J., Therese Anders, Jonathan N. Markowitz, and Miriam Barnum. 2022. "New Estimates of Over 500 Years of Historic GDP and Population Data." Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(3): 553–91.
Hensel, Paul R. 2018. "ICOW Colonial History Data Set, version 1.1." Available at https://www.paulhensel.org/icowcol.html.
Other Points of Departure
The intended use of these data is to instruct students about t-tests with an application to the development trajectories of former colonies in the African continent. This particular topic is definitely fraught with caveats to consider, and such a simple data set intended to teach students rudimentary methods around a question that might understand just cannot cover all these issues. Please consider the following scholarship on this topic.
Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2001. "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation". American Economic Review 91(5): 1369–1401.
Bolt, Jutta and Dirk Bezemer. 2009. "Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education?" The Journal of Development Studies 45(1): 24–54.
Gallup, John Luke, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Andrew D. Mellinger. 1999. "Geography and Economic Development." International Regional Science Review 22(2): 179–232.
Glaeser, Edward L., Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer. 2004. "Do Institutions Cause Growth?" Journal of Economic Growth 9: 271–303.
La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny. 1999. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 15(1): 222-79.